Mike Phillips (writer)

Michael Angus "Mike" Phillips, OBE (born 8 August 1941), is a British writer and broadcast journalist of Guyanese descent.

Early years

Phillips was born in Georgetown, a port city in the equatorial colony British Guiana. The family migrated to Islington in 1956 when he was about 14. He was educated at the University of London (English), the University of Essex (Politics), and received a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Goldsmiths College, London.

Career

Phillips worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983, then became a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. In 1992 he became a full-time writer. He has said, "One of the experiences that made me a writer was the realisation that I was written out of a small piece of literary history in the film Prick Up Your Ears, the biography of controversial playwright Joe Orton, author of Entertaining Mr Sloane. Orton and his friend Kenneth Halliwell were frequent visitors to Essex Road Library where I worked as a library assistant. I regularly spoke to them and didn't know that they were defacing the books, an act that eventually put them in jail. When the scene was depicted on film I felt I should have been included, and realised that you can't rely on others to write your story, sometimes you have to do it yourself."

Phillips is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: Blood Rights (1989; serialised on BBC TV), The Late Candidate (1990), Point of Darkness (1994), An Image to Die For (1995). He is also the author of London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001), a series of interlinked autobiographical essays and stories. With his brother, the political journalist Trevor Phillips, he wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-255909-9) to accompany a BBC television series.

He writes for The Guardian newspaper, and was formerly cross-cultural curator at the Tate and a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Awards and honours

• 1990 - Silver Dagger award by the Crime Writers' Association for The Late Candidate
• 1996 - Arts Foundation Award for Thriller Writing
• 2007 - OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2007 New Year's Honours List

Books

Fiction

• Smell of the Coast and Other Stories (1987). London: Akira Press.
• Blood Rights (1989). London: Michael Joseph; New York: St. Martin's Press.
• The Late Candidate (1990). London: Michael Joseph; New York: St. Martin's Press.
• Boys 'n' the Hood (1991). London: Pan.
• Point of Darkness: A Sam Dean Mystery (1994). London: Michael Joseph, 1994; New York: St. Martin's Press.
• An Image to Die For (1997). New York, St. Martin's Press.
• The Dancing Face (1997). London and New York: HarperCollins.
• A Shadow of Myself (2000). New York: HarperCollins.
• Kind of Union (2005). London: Continuum.

Non-fiction

• Community Work and Racism (1982). London: Routledge.
• Notting Hill in the Sixties (1991); text, with photography by Charlie Phillips. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
• Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (with Trevor Phillips). London: HarperCollins, 1998.
• London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain. London: Continuum, 2001.

External links

• Mike Phillips at British Council: Literature
• "About Dr Mike Phillips", Online gallery - Black Europeans, British Library
• Book details at twbooks
• Onyekachi Wambu, "Black British Literature since Windrush", BBC History, 3 March 2011
• "Interview with Mike Phillips by Romanian writer George Arion", November 2010, Profusion Publishers
• Mike Phillips at Library of Congress Authorities, with 8 catalogue records