Passiontide: Monique Roffey in conversation with Joanna Pocock
Thursday 15 May at 7:30 pm - 10:00 pm
PASSIONTIDE
Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, 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.
As the days pass, this shocking event draws together four women. There’s Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, the pink-haired, straight-talking star of the activism scene. Gigi, the ‘notorious’ founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago.
In a community in which women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked time after time, the group soon find themselves compelled to speak out – and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage…
Monique Roffey, FRSL, is an award-winning Trinidadian born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her latest novel, Passiontide, was published in June 2024.
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 was a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion and she is a member of the Hard Art collective. She is also a Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship.
