Caryl Phillips came to the UK from St Kitts at four months old in 1958 and went on to earn acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic as a literary polymath equally renowned for his novels, plays, and non-fiction. His work investigates displacement and belonging, identity and exclusion, and the meaning of home and nationhood with a clarity and iconoclastic originality that place him in the highest tier of English letters.

Now he joins Gary Younge to reveal Another Man in the Street, a new novel telling the powerful and evocative story of a young West Indian man’s search for home in 1960s London – and painting a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London.

In the early Sixties, Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill – then as a rent collector for unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman.

Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in London to the present day, Caryl’s novel paints a striking portrait of a flawed but vividly alive man grappling with the lifelong disillusionments of exile – and the uniquely complicated identity of the Windrush generation.

Speakers:

Caryl Phillips is the award-winning author of eleven novels, four stage plays and five volumes of non-fiction, in addition to numerous radio plays, scripts and essays. His latest fiction, A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018), focuses on the life of Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys. Identity, migration and history are among the main themes of his writing, which also stands out for its formal daring.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine,  the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. He has written six books: Dispatches From the Diaspora, From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter; Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He has also written for The New York Review of Books. Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.