Place of birth
Trinidad and Tobago
Place of residence
United Kingdom
National identity
Trinidad and Tobago
United Kingdom
Gender
Female

Monique Roffey

Short biography
Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri, and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and mostly educated in the UK. She is the author of six books, five novels and a memoir. Three of her novels are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean region. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (2009) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2010 and the Encore Award in 2011. Archipelago (2012) won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Orion Award 2014. House of Ashes, published in 2014, is a novel drawn from historical events and tells the story of a botched coup d’etat. It was shortlisted for the COSTA Fiction Award, 2015 and longlisted for the OCM BOCAS Award in 2015. A new novel, The Tryst, was published in July 2017 by indie press Dodo Ink. Her memoir, With the Kisses of His Mouth traces a personal journey of mid-life sexual self-discovery. She is a Lecturer on the MFA in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University, and tutor for the Norwich Writers Centre. Her seventh book, The Mermaid of Black Conch is out in April 2020.

"Roffey is a masterful writer whose words are subsumed in the pictures they paint and the tales they spin." -- Publishers Weekly