Author Monique Roffey Crowdfunds for her new novel The Mermaid of Black Conch

Monique Roffey joined Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing (Fiction) in 2016.

Monique Roffey joined Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing (Fiction) in 2016.

She was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and she has life-long and ongoing links to Trinidad and the Caribbean region. She comes and goes a lot and she teaches creative writing in Port of Spain as well as in the UK. Three of her five novels, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, Archipelago, and House of Ashes are set in the region. In these books, Monique draws on family biography, history, academic research, witness testimony and contemporary life. Most of these books contain an element of what Cuban writer, Alejo Carpentier called lo real maravilloso, or the marvellous real. In short, Monique is a writer, born in the Caribbean, living half there and half in diaspora, and something of a magical realist. Until now, she has written close to home, the place of her birth. 

Her memoir, With the Kisses of his Mouth (2011) and her newest novel The Tryst (July, 2017) are linked and form a smaller, but equally committed, body of work which examines female sexuality. This enquiry is ongoing. 

She alsos write essays and journalism, most recently Turtle Diary, for the 17th International Berlin Literature Festival, and Menage a Trois, an essay for Boundless, a new online magazine dedicated to the literary essay form. 

The Mermaid of Black Conch

THE MERMAID OF BLACK CONCH weaves together myth and magical realism to tell a story of a cursed woman denied a rite of passage, surrendering to romantic and erotic love. Roffey's mermaid is a woman whose story is reimagined and retold. In her novel, 'Sweet Voice' re-emerges in her human form and lives on land, again, for a short time. She is an exiled young woman, an outcast, a woman shunned by her tribe. She has endured millennia of loneliness and she is a woman with shamanic instincts. In this novel she comes back to live on a very different Caribbean island, Black Conch, in 1976. 

The novel asks, could we care for such a woman again in modern times? Might she suffer the same fate on account of her beauty and her talent? The novel's themes explore female jealousy and desire, love and loss. Most of all, it is a love story and an eternal curse is beaten.

Monique Roffey's novel will be published by renowned Caribbean publisher Peepal Tree Press in early April, 2020. They are supporting her in this endeavour to raise funds for a publicity campaign and supplying the rewards of books and an A3 poster.

To see the Crowdfunding campaign, please click here.