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Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.
His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen "Best of 2004" lists. Angelica, his third novel, made the Washington Post best fiction of 2007 and led that paper to call him "One of the best writers in America." The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, on the Post's best of 2009 list, and inspired Kirkus to write, "Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade." His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published in 2011 to critical acclaim, including being named a New York Times Notable Book, and being shortlisted for the IMPAC International Literary Prize.
The play taken from that book received its world premiere reading at New York's Public Theater in 2011 and became a full stage production in 2013, under the auspices of the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project. His short story, "Companionship," was adapted into an opera by Rachel Peters and received its debut at the Fort Worth Opera in 2019.
The film version of Angelica was released in 2015, and other films based on his work are currently in development. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.
He has written for television's Damages (FX/DirecTV), Bloodline (Netflix), Tokyo Vice (HBOMax) and created television series for FX Networks, HBO, and Sundance. He has further television pilots in development.
He lives in New York with his two sons.
Arthur Phillips's website
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Write what you know!
Hemingway’s tyrannical proverb haunts
writing classes and roils the sleep of the lonely would-be novelist, who in
relentless dreams and depressing reality alike feels himself drowning in Uncle
Ernest’s quasi-papal bull. "Write what I know? What I know… But what," the
author frets, "if I don’t know anything?"
In that case, not to worry, for there is always the British Museum.
If you should decide to write a novel about a topic you know almost nothing
about, a scholarly discipline requiring years to master, if you feel compelled
to set the story in a land you’ve scarcely visited, during an era you can only
dimly conjure from childhood reading and yellowed clippings, if you have
followed your hyperactive and petulant imagination down a rabbit hole and there
gazed at glowing, magical projections of inverted pyramids and pith-helmeted
lunatics and pharaohs with unconventional appetites, but found little by way of
actual knowledge, rest easy, because at the British Museum you will make a new
friend: an expert who not only knows everything, but who is required--yes, required--to
answer all your e-questions, no matter how many, how foolish, how wrong-headed,
fantastic, or ...
Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea, God Lives in St. Petersburg, The Father of All Things, Why Video Games Matter, Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (2012) and Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Prague
Try:
God Lives In St. Petersburg
by Tom Bissell
Louis de Bernières works include A Partisan's Daughter, Birds Without Wings, Red Dog, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, Corelli's Mandolin (Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book, 1995), The ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Prague
Try:
Birds Without Wings
by Louis de Bernieres
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