Author Talks About How Exorcising the Past Drove Him to Write

Written By Conor Fowler

Purchase College Community Reporting Team

PURCHASE, NY - Award-winning author Caryl Phillips told a Purchase College audience recently that boyhood memories of the notorious Moors Murders, which targeted immigrant children like himself, combined with “miserable” experiences at a camp for impoverished youngsters, drove him into writing as a way of exorcising the past.

After reading an excerpt from his ninth and newest book, “The Lost Child”—described as a dramatic response to Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”—at the college’s Neuberger Museum of Art, Phillips said that “each novel is its own challenge. Each book is different, so you just start another one. I’m always thinking about the next book, I’m just always looking in that direction.”

But, he added, “It never gets any easier.”

Phillips, born in 1958 in St. Kitts, an island in the West Indies, and moved to Britain with his family when he was 4 months old. Because of that immigration is a major theme in most of his works. “They’re my people,” he said of immigrants.

Phillips, who is black, said when he was young there was less racial tension in Britain than classism, and that as a poor immigrant he was at the bottom of the social ladder.

Speaking of his experiences in a camp for poor youth at Silverdale on the Lancashire coast, he noted that it was “a miserable place” and “no place for misfits, loners or agoraphobiacs.”

“For a person who has spent a great many years writing about the importance of the past, it is quite shocking how I’ve repressed the two weeks I’ve spent at a camp for underprivileged children,” Phillips said.

But it left an indelible mark. What he remembered most, he said, “was sitting alone reading Emily Brontë.”

Phillips was also influenced by the much-publicized Moors Murders of the mid-1960s. The killers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, sadistically killed five immigrant children, ages 10-17, and buried them in the moors in and around Manchester.

“My childhood was far from idyllic,” Phillips said.

But it all fueled his passion for story-telling.

“I got my start writing because I felt I had something to say, you know, about my life, and about what I’ve seen in the world,” Phillips said.

Phillips has won many literary awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel “Crossing the River,” which was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. His novel, “A Distant Shore” won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize and “Dancing in the Dark” won the 2006 PEN/Open Book Award.

Photo credit: Courtesy.