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.
‘Roffey is a masterful writer whose words are subsumed in the pictures they paint and the tales they spin.’ — Publishers Weekly
Read an interview with Monique Roffey here.
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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.
HOUSE OF ASHES
Literary fiction, 368 pages
Simon & Schuster - July 2014
The haunting story of Ashes and Breeze, two disaffected young men on a Caribbean island who follow a charismatic leader into a disastrous coup.
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