Born in Trinidad, Monique Roffey is an award-winning author of several books, including six novels. Her memoir, With the Kisses of his Mouth (2011), traced a personal journey of mid-life sexual self-discovery. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2020 and was shortlisted for several other literary awards. Set in a tiny Caribbean village, it features a fisherman whose surprise catch turns out to be a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid. Monique Roffey appears at Aye Write this week.
Favourite book you read as child? All the Nancy Drew mysteries excited me (female agency) and then all my brothers’ Willard Price books enraptured me (adventure).
Writers should be free to express their opinions – not strangled by Stasi-like ‘diversity’ rules
Arts critics are being warned by the union Equity to watch what they say. Whatever the intentions, it’s a sinister, anti-free speech move
29 April 2021 • 5:00am
Critically isolated: writers and journalists, says Ben Lawrence, shouldn t be ordered to conform to industry pressure
Credit: Getty
Last week, the acting union Equity delivered a new set of guidelines for theatre critics. Among its recommendations was that critics should consider their ethnicity and relative privilege when writing their reviews. The union urged that they “avoid referring to immutable characteristics such as age, race, gender and appearance, unless such characteristics directly affect the production’s meaning”. For a decade, I have been a critic across several art forms, including theatre, and while I hope that, out of fairness, I have always adhered to the above, I am appalled that Equity ar