Caryl Phillips with Radhika Jones: Another Man in the Street
Booker Prize finalist Caryl Phillips discusses his new novel with Radhika Jones, exploring race, displacement, and the making of a cosmopolitan life.
Why we picked this
Phillips is one of the few novelists who can locate the precise emotional weight of displacement without sentimentalizing it. Radhika Jones is one of the sharper interviewers in literary New York. This one earns a Tuesday night.
Caryl Phillips has spent four decades writing about the Black Atlantic — the routes and ruptures of diaspora, the persistence of race as a social fact, the psychological costs of belonging nowhere entirely. His new novel, Another Man in the Street, continues that project through a story of cosmopolitan life shadowed by history, narrated with the spare, precise control that has made him one of Britain’s most important literary voices.
Phillips speaks in conversation with Radhika Jones, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and one of the more rigorous interlocutors in New York’s literary world. Their exchange is likely to range beyond the novel to the broader questions that have defined Phillips’s work: what it means to write from the margins, how fiction can hold political truths that journalism cannot, and what it looks like when a writer commits to a subject for a lifetime.
An evening for readers who want more than a book club — the kind of conversation that illuminates a whole body of work rather than just the latest title.