The Mermaid of Black Conch has taken this year’s £30,000 Costa Book of The Year Award.
Judges deemed it a classic in the making.
“I really wanted this book to be seen and read”
Monique Roffey, 55, has won the award for her sixth novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch. The story of a fisherman on a Caribbean island who is awaiting a catch, but gets more than he bargained for when a mermaid emerges out of the water.
Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer who has previously received shortlists for Costa and Orange book prizes. Her new novel was published by the small independent publishers Peepal Tree, which has a heavy focus on literature from the Caribbean. Roffey crowdfunded the book back in 2019 to raise money for a publicity campaign.
“utterly original”
Suzannah Lipscomb, one of the judges on the Costa panel, said the book was “utterly original and unlike anything we’ve ever read and feels like a classic in the making from a writer at the height of her powers.”
It took Lipscomb and the other judges three hours to come to a decision and said her story was evocative and so immediately classic that it must have been read before.
Roffey’s publisher won the prestigious T.S. Eliot poetry prize last year with British -Trinidadian poet, Roger Robinson, and his collection A Portable Paradise. Peepal Tree are rushing to get a reprint of The Mermaid of Black Conch released after it beat other titles such as The Louder I Will Sing and Love After Love. Both stories of discovery.
Roffey said “I really wanted this book to be seen and read, so this time last year we were all ready to go, then Covid-19 hit us all and the book fell into a black hole.”
She claims there is no superlative that she could use to describe what a breakthrough this is.
Words by Jaimie Kay
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