for the Booker Prize. After taking up the position at Amherst, Phillips found himself doing "a sort of triangular thing" for a number of years, residing between England, St Kitts, and the U.S. Finding this way of living both "incredibly exhausting" and "prohibitively expensive", Phillips ultimately decided to give up his residence in St. Kitts, though he says he still makes regular visits to the island. In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order. In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English. He was made an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011. Works and critical reception Phillips has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles, and his writing is concerned with issues of "origins, belongings and exclusion", as noted by a reviewer of his 2015 novel The Lost Child. Phillips's work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the 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. Phillips received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Dancing in the Dark in 2006. Activism Phillips is the patron of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, which works to promote the memory of the death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian man in Leeds who was persecuted to death by the police. On 25 April 2022 Phillips unveiled a Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque commemorating Oluwale's death, which was torn down hours later. Bibliography Novels The Final Passage (Faber and Faber, 1985, ; Picador, 1995, paperback ) A State of Independence (Faber and Faber, 1986, ; paperback ) Higher Ground: A Novel in Three Parts (Viking, 1989, ) Cambridge (Bloomsbury, 1991; Vintage, 2008, paperback ) Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993, ) The Nature of Blood (1997; Vintage, 2008, paperback ) A Distant Shore (Secker, 2003, hardback ; Vintage, 2004, paperback ) Dancing in the Dark (Secker, 2005, ) Foreigners: Three English Lives (Harvill Secker, 2007, ) In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker, 2009, hardback ; Vintage, 2010, paperback ) The Lost Child (Oneworld Publications, 2015, hardback, 978-1780747989 paperback) A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, hardback, ) Essay