Marlene NourbeSe Philip, who writes as M. NourbeSe Philip, was born on 3 February 1947 in Moriah, Tobago. She earned a BSc in economics and an MSc in political science at the University of the West Indies, then moved to Canada to study law at the University of Western Ontario, graduating in 1973. She practised as a lawyer for seven years before turning to writing full-time.
Her early poetry collections were Thorns (1980) and Salmon Courage (1983). Her third, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, published in 1989, explores language, colonialism and the silencing of Black women, and in manuscript form won the Casa de las Américas Prize. Critics called it a linguistic and feminist odyssey. She won the Tradewinds Collective prizes in poetry and short fiction in 1988.
Philip also wrote novels, including the young adult novel Harriet's Daughter (1988) and Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), as well as essays and plays, among them Coups and Calypsos, produced in London and Toronto in 1999. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1990 and a McDowell Fellow in 1991, and has taught creative fiction at New York University.
Her best-known work is Zong! (2008), a book-length poem that responds to the Zong massacre of November 1781, when the crew of a British slave ship threw about 150 enslaved Africans overboard so the ship's owners could claim insurance. The only public record of the event is the legal decision in the insurance case Gregson v. Gilbert, and Philip builds the whole poem from the words of that decision, fragmenting them to tell the story the law left out. It is subtitled As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng.
The poem has been widely studied and performed, and Philip is a leading voice on the poetics of memory and loss. She received the Toronto Arts Award for writing and publishing, the 2001 Rebels for a Cause Award, a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award in 2012 and, in 2021, the Canada Council for the Arts' Molson Prize for outstanding achievement in the arts. She lives in Toronto.
- Author of Zong!, a poem made from the words of a slave ship legal case
- Casa de las Américas Prize for She Tries Her Tongue
- Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, 1990
- Novelist and playwright as well as poet
- Lawyer turned writer
- The law is a text, and it can be read differently. Philip turned a court judgment into an act of remembrance.
- Fragments can carry a whole history. Broken words in Zong! speak for lives the archive erased.