The University of Virginia has selected Caryl Phillips to serve as the Distinguished Kapnick Writer-in-Residence from April 11 to April 22.

As Writer-in-Residence, Phillips will teach a seminar, meet one-on-one with graduate and undergraduate writers, and give a public lecture and a public reading during his time in the Department of English’s Creative Writing Program. The Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program was first established last fall with the late James Salter as its first guest.

“I am very honored to be the second writer selected for this residency,” Phillips said, according to a press release from the program. “U.Va. has a long and distinguished tradition of teaching creative writing, and a residency like this helps to further enhance the ongoing conversation about the importance of imaginative writing. Furthermore, the first writer, the late James Salter, was someone whose work I greatly admire. It’s very nice to feel that the baton is being passed, temporarily, from him to me.”

Phillips’s work explores African diaspora in the Caribbean, England, and the United States, and also “tackles issues of belonging and identity,” and “race and immigration.” Born in St. Kitts, he was raised in Leeds, England, and studied English literature at Oxford University. Now a professor of English at Yale University, Caryl has published ten novels, five collections of essays, several plays and screenplays, and two anthologies.

Phillips has received several awards for his work; his 1993 novel, Crossing the River, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2004, he received a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book for his novel, A Distant Shore. 2006, his eighth novel, Dancing in the Dark, received the PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He has also received awards for his nonfiction essay collections, which include Color Me English (2011), A New World Order (2001), and The European Tribe (1987), the latter of which received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. Phillips has also received Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, and a Lannan Literary Award.

To learn more about Caryl Phillips, take a look at his website.

Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian