He was born on St. Kitts. At four months old, his family moved to England and was brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire. He read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He mainly began writing drama scripts.

He has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles. His work has been recognised by numerous awards including Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for A Distant Shore. Beside being an accomplished writer, Caryl Phillips is also a noted professor. He has taught at numerous universities in countries including: Barbados, Ghana, India, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States of America.

Novels

• The Final Passage (1985)
• A State of Independence (1986)
• Higher Ground (1989)
• Cambridge (1991)
• Crossing the River (1993)
• The Nature of Blood (1997)
• A Distant Shore (2003)
• Dancing in the Dark (2005)
• Foreigners (2007)
• In the Falling Snow (2009)

Essay collections

• The European Tribe
• The Atlantic Sound
• A New World Order