Belonging

Professor Tessa McWatt and Costa Book Award winner Monique Roffey discuss race, identity and belonging with Izabella Scott

Acclaimed writer and academic Professor Tessa McWatt, and 2020 Costa Book award winner and local author Monique Roffey, discuss race, identity and belonging from their own unique perspectives. Chaired by The White Review editor, Izabella Scott.

“Monique Roffey is a writer of verve, vibrancy and compassion, and her work is always a joy to read.”

sarah hall

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey is an award winning Trinidadian born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (Peepal Tree Press), won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2020, and was nominated for eight major awards. The film rights were sold to Dorothy Street Pictures and will be developed by Film Four. Her other Caribbean novels,

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and House of Ashes have been nominated for major awards too (Costa, Orange, Encore etc). Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature in 2013. Her work has been translated into several languages. She is a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion. She is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and a tutor for the National Writers Centre.

Tessa McWatt

Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize.  She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018 for her first non-fiction book, Shame On Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which won the 2020 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize 2020.  She co-edited, with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her latest novel, The Snow Line, was shortlisted for the Volcano Prize. She is also a librettist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Izabella Scott

Izabella Scott is a writer based in London. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, Artforum, Frieze and others. She is co-editor of The White Review.