Jospeh Conrad (1957-1924) grew up amid political unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea with the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in 1894. Over the next three decades he revolutionized the English novel with works such as Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), and Victory (1915). Caryl Phillips is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Phillips is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York City.