Show 6: The author and playwright on what keeps him up at night...
Caryl Phillips is the award-winning St Kitts-born author and academic whose latest novel, Foreigners: Three English Lives, about Francis Barber, Randolph Turpin and David oluwale has just been published.
"Usually I spend most of the day writing, which doesn't leave much time for reading until I get to the evening. The type of books I tend to read tend to be nothing to do with what I'm working on during the day. I don't want to be distracted by any particular author or book, so I tend to read several books at the same time."
"This is a collection of short stories by Irish writer Roddy Doyle.Dublin in particular and Ireland in general has become a much more multi-cultural, multi-racial city in the last decade or so and these stories chart the lives of various immigrants. They all have a really strong, episodic narrative drive; there's lots of cliffhangers. One of the great things about reading this novel was that it made me realise how much we need a book like this in Britain."
"The fight between George Forman and Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa in 1974 was probably the most significant sporting event of the 20th century, for all sorts of social, cultural and historical reasons. Mailer was there; he was a witness, he reported on it and he subsequently wrote what is a brilliant piece of reportage about the evvents that surrounded it. For anyone interested in literature to do with sport or literature to do with post-colonial Africa, I think this book is a classic text."