M. NourbeSe Philip

Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947 ), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.

Life and works Born in the Caribbean in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip graduated in 1965 from Bishop Anstey High School and went on to study at the University of the West Indies, where she received her B.Sc.(Econ.) degree. Her body of work – poetry, fiction and non-fiction – is taught widely at university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique.

Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high-school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and in a German-language edition.

Philip's most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form.

Her 2008 work Zong! is a poem cycle based on Gregson v. Gilbert, the legal case which determined that the Zong massacre, a mass killing of almost 150 Africans by the crew of a British slave ship, was legal. A dramatized reading of Zong! was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the latter includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On 16 April 2012, at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!—an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours, in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In 2024, upon its fifteenth anniversary, Zong! was republished by Graywolf Press with a new preface and two introductions.

Her writing has been featured in many anthologies, including International Feminist Fiction (edited by Julia Penelope and Sarah Valentine, 1992), Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby, 1992), Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (edited by Rosemary Sullivan, 2000), among others.