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Monique Roffey is an award-winning writer born in Trinidad in 1965 whose novels include
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle and
House of Ashes, which were shortlisted, respectively, for the Orange and the Costa prizes. She is also a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School. Her sixth novel,
The Mermaid of Black Conch, won the Costa book of the year and is shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio prize, announced on 24 March.
1. Art
Bottle and bowl with poetry in Persian, 1180–1220, Iran.
This may well be the first thing I go and see on 21 June. They’ve got something like 350 objects that go back over 5,000 years. I’m completely magnetised by Iran and yet, it’s so mysterious and so closed off to us. I’m obsessed with looking at artefacts. I saw the Buddhist display not long ago at the V&A and I loved that. I like looking at old things. At the Museum of London, they have tons of things they found in the Thames, from hairy mammoth skulls to Viking helmets to