Monique Roffey - Passiontide

Following her wonderful interview at our festival three years ago,  we are very pleased to announce that Monique is returning to Hastings to talk about her new book, Passiontide. 

Passiontide opens early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, when 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. 

Monique will be talking to Sam Davey, founder of the Hastings Book Festival, about Passiontide which has been described as "a fiercely alive novel about women daring to imagine a different world".  

The event will be opened by Karen Arthur - a broadcaster and artist living in Hastings. Her first book 'Grandmas Locs’ celebrates the beauty of Black and mixed race hair through the magical bond of a grandmother and her grandson, will be published in October 2024.

This session will last aprroximately an hour and will be followed by a book signing.

More about Monique:

Monique Roffey, FRSL, is an award winning Trinidadian born British writer of

novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. 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 is a co-founder of

Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion. She is a Professor of Contemporary

Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. Passiontide, her new novel, was

published in June, 2024.

Image credit: Matilda Hill-Jenkins