This special issue on British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips opens with three creative contributions — by Phillips himself, and by fellow writers Robert Antoni and Johny Pitts — that highlight the centrality of literary friendships and intergenerational relationships in Phillips’ development as an artist.

The rest of the issue is made up of eight scholarly essays examining Phillips’ work from a variety of angles that enhance our understanding of this multi-talented artist’s production as well as various issues pertaining to postcolonial studies. While Phillips’ work has, until now, been overwhelmingly viewed from the perspective of diaspora, identity, or trauma studies, these eight articles pursue underexplored paths through Phillips’ oeuvre and thereby cover several of the blind spots in today’s scholarship on the author. They do so either by using unusual lenses such as ecocriticism, stylistics, and sports, or by tackling such topics as Phillips’ black female characters, view of the heroic, use of the biographical genre, treatment of Eastern European migration, and recourse to intertextuality in The Lost Child (2015). For all its kaleidoscopic nature, this investigation of Phillips’ fiction and nonfiction cannot achieve comprehensiveness but will hopefully open up new vistas for the study of his still-evolving body of work.

Table of contents

Guest editorial
Thinking Caryl Phillips Out of the Box
Bénédicte Ledent

Personal essays
The Enigma of Unarrival: A Tribute to Caryl Phillips
Robert Antoni

Daffodils: A Meeting With Caryl Phillips
Johny Pitts

Articles
For the "Dark Star": Reading Womanism and Black Womanhood in the Novels of Caryl Phillips.
Shauna M. Morgan Kirlew

Caryl Phillips and the Heroic
Ulla Rahbek

Migrant Subjects, Invisible Presences: Biography in the Writings of Caryl Phillips
Louise Yelin

Playing Home: The Boy in the Mirror as Sportswriter
Ben Carrington

The Poetics of (In)visibility:A Stylistic Analysis of Caryl Phillips's Foreigners: Three English Lives
Daria Tunca

Nature-Function in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge
Carine Mardorossian

Forgetting to Remember: Multidirectional Communities in Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow
Samantha Reive Holland

Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection
Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O'Callaghan