Michael Angus Phillips OBE FRSL (born 8 August 1941),[1] is a British writer and broadcast journalist of Guyanese descent.
[5] 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.
"[6] Phillips is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean:[7] Blood Rights (1989; serialised on BBC TV starring Brian Bovell), The Late Candidate (1990), Point of Darkness (1994), An Image to Die For (1995).
[9] 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 marking the 50th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of the HMT Empire Windrush, the ship that brought the first significant wave of post-war migrants from the Caribbean.
[13][14] In 2021, his novel The Dancing Face, originally published in 1997, was reissued by Penguin Books in the "Black Britain: Writing Back" series curated by Bernardine Evaristo.