Creative Writing lecturer shortlisted for inventive literature award

Dr Monique Roffey’s novel ‘The Mermaid of Black Conch’ shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize

Author and lecturer Dr Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch has been shortlisted for a literary award that celebrates original and inventive writing.

Dr Roffey, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Writing School, is in contention for The Goldsmiths Prize 2020.

The Prize was launched in 2013, in association with the New Statesman, to celebrate and reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.

The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.

I'm delighted and humbled to be nominated for this prize. It's important that fiction writers can feel they can push boundaries and 'break the mould' in their work.

Set in a tiny Caribbean village in the 1970s, The Mermaid of Black Conch is about Aycayia, a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, who becomes entranced by a fisherman and his song.

The book explores themes of unconditional love, friendship, family and loss, examined without sentimentality. Roffey writes convincingly about a mermaid, a ‘legend drawn from the sea’, returned to land, to survive, heal and live again, as a real woman in modern times.

Roffey said: "I'm delighted and humbled to be nominated for this prize. It's important that fiction writers can feel they can push boundaries and 'break the mould' in their work. My lonely outcast of a mermaid, once an indigenous woman of Taino origin, needed a way to speak. I found a method and form to re-imagine her speech in this book.

“Her story is woven using not just her own newfound voice, but that of others who were either involved in her care taking or who knew of her story in Black Conch. I feel deep gratitude to a have a complex work like this acknowledged by Goldsmiths and The New Statesman."

The winners of the Goldsmiths Prize will be announced on November 11 2020.