Mike Phillips (writer)

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

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.

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 starring Brian Bovell), 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) to accompany a BBC television series.

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