In association with Get Up Stand Up Now, Caryl Phillips will highlight his connections to the filmmaker Horace Ové, as the writer of his cricket comedy Playing Away, whilst Linton Kwesi Johnson brings his ground-breaking bibliography and discography to life with an accompanying literary reading.
Held in partnership with Speaking Volumes.
Biographies
Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and brought up in England. He is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and fiction. Dancing in the Dark won the PEN Open Book Award, and A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for The European Tribe, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written for the stage, television, and film. He wrote and co-produced a three hour film of his first novel, The Final Passage for British television, and he adapted V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur for Merchant Ivory Films. He is a contributor to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds honorary doctorates from a number of universities. He has taught at universities in Britain, Singapore, Ghana, Sweden and Barbados and is currently Professor of English at Yale University. His latest novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset was published in 2018.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, went to Tulse Hill secondary school and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Whilst still at school he joined the Black Panthers, helped to organise a poetry workshop within the movement and developed his work with Rasta Love, a group of poets and drummers. In 1977 he was awarded a C Day Lewis Fellowship, becoming the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of Black theatre and art.
Maya Jaggi
Maya Jaggi is ‘one of Britain’s most respected arts journalists’, according to the UK’s Open University, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2012 for ‘extending the map of international writing’. A global cultural journalist, writer, critic and artistic director, she writes for the Financial Times Arts pages and the New York Review of Books, and contributes to the BBC, following 15 years as a profile writer and book critic for the Guardian Review. She has reported from five continents and won several UK national press awards. Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she has been a DAAD Arts and Media fellow in Berlin, and an EU Senior Expert in Cultural Journalism in post-Soviet Europe in 2017. She was Artistic Director in 2016 of Where Europe Meets Asia: Georgia25, the UK’s first festival of contemporary Georgian writers and film. Among literary awards she has co-judged are the Man Asian Literature prize in Hong Kong (as chair), and the €100,000 International Dublin Impac prize.