Foreigners: Three English Lives

Caryl Phillips

09/2008 · Random House

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'A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society' Observer

Francis Barber, 'given' to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, afforded an unusual depth of freedom, which, after Johnson's death, would help hasten his wretched demise....

Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and who ended his life in debt and despair...

David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life and death would question the reality of English justice, and serve as a wake-up call for the entire nation.

Each of these men's stories is told in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the tragedy of their lives.

And each explores the themes at the heart of Caryl Phillips' work - belonging, identity, and race.

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Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006.