On writing, reading, interpreting (and Pan Africanism): an interview with Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is one of the most thought-provoking creative voices of contemporary Anglophone literature. His publications, which include novels, essays, anthologies, plays as well as a number of screenplays, have achieved public and critical acclaim not only for the reflections they invite on issues of displacement, identity, belonging, and otherness, but also for the use of narrative techniques that often present the reader with discontinuous narrations, fragmented accounts of events, and multiple perspectives. The interview that follows, originally conceived as a conversation on the novel The Nature of Blood (1997), has unexpectedly broadened to take on wider issues such as the author’s stance on Pan Africanism, intertextuality, character formation, and his perception of critical work.