Photo: Marcus Bastel
Monique Roffey
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Monique Roffey, FRSL, is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her latest novel, PASSIONTIDE, was published in June 2024. THE MERMAID OF BLACK CONCH won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2020, and was nominated for eight other major awards. Her other Caribbean novels, THE WHITE WOMAN ON THE GREEN BICYCLE and HOUSE OF ASHES have also been nominated for awards. ARCHIPELAGO won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature in 2013. Her work has been translated into many languages and adapted for screen. She was a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion and she is a member of the Hard Art collective. She is also a Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University.
‘Monique Roffey is a unique talent and most daring and versatile of writers. I never know what to expect and I’m never disappointed.’ – Bernardine Evaristo
‘Roffey is a masterful writer whose words are subsumed in the pictures they paint and the tales they spin.’ — Publishers Weekly
‘Monique Roffey has established herself as a fearless writer with her choices of subject and her visceral style.’ – Kapka Kassabova, The Guardian
‘Violence against women is a global issue, but PASSIONTIDE imagines a feminist reckoning in the wake of one woman’s murder on the fictional Caribbean island of St Colibri… Roffey masters the building sense of tension and scale as the women’s protest gathers strength.’ – Service95 on PASSIONTIDE
‘A daring, mesmerising novel that continually unseats expectation – I was deliciously unsure, throughout, what would happen next. With her fierce and shapeshifting mermaid, Roffey has created a modern myth about belonging and the bonds humans form with each other and with their land, single-handedly bringing magic realism up to date.’ – Maggie O’Farrell on MERMAID OF BLACK CONCH
Read an interview with Monique Roffey here.
Visit Monique’s website
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PASSIONTIDE
Literary fiction, 368 pages
Harvill Secker, June 2024 (UK); Knopf, September 2024 (US)
Four women spark a revolution on a Caribbean island…
Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.
Fiercely alive, PASSIONTIDE is a novel of women daring to imagine a different world.
THE MERMAID OF BLACK CONCH
Literary, 320 pages, Peepal Tree Press, April 2020
Reissue, Vintage, June 2021
March 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. Aycayia, a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by this man David and his song.
ARCHIPELAGO
Literary fiction
Simon & Schuster - July 2012
A flood destroys Gavin Weald's home in Trinidad and rips his family apart. A year later he returns to his house and tries to start over, but his daughter's nightmares about the torrents make life there unbearable. So father and daughter - and their dog - embark upon a voyage to make peace with the waters.
"Appealingly warmhearted." -- Kirkus
THE WHITE WOMAN ON THE GREEN BICYCLE
Literary fiction, 439 pages
Simon & Schuster, 2009/2022
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease. As they adapt to new circumstances, their marriage endures for better or worse, despite growing political unrest and racial tensions that affect their daily lives. But when George finds a cache of letters that Sabine has hidden from him, the discovery sets off a devastating series of consequences as other secrets begin to emerge.