We are delighted to have added another mentor to The Book Edit’s stable. Rosa Rogers is a Doctor of Philosophy in The Contemporary Novel: Practice as Research, and an experienced writing mentor and workshop facilitator.

A talented author in her own right, Rosa’s debut literary novel, Composition, was completed as part of her PhD at the University of Kent. Her short fiction, poetry and visual art have been published and/or exhibited in The Menteur (Paris), Stirred Press, Northern Quarter, East Street Arts, The Media Centre and Vortex Gallery, and she has performed her work across France and the UK.

Not content with her own creative output, Rosa is also a creator of multiple community projects, e.g. Poetry etc. and Tales of a Town, and is the former Co-Director of Vortex Gallery.

Rosa currently works as an assistant lecturer in Creative Writing in Canterbury, City, University of London, and Nantes where she receives outstanding feedback from students on her warm, generous and inspiring approach to teaching.

We are thrilled to announce she will now also be one of The Book Edit’s fiction mentors, working side-by-side with emerging writers to help develop their work and their confidence.

Welcome, Rosa!

We were delighted to hear that Monique Roffey had won the Costa Book Award 2020 for her novel The Mermaid of Black Conch. Published by Peepal Tree press, this is Roffey’s sixth novel and a thing of pure beauty: a deeply moving love story between local fisherman, David Baptiste, and the mermaid he first lays eyes on one morning off Murder Bay:

‘David was strumming his guitar and singing to himself when she first raised her barnacled, seaweed-clotted head from the flat, grey sea, its stark hues of turquoise not yet stirred.’

This barnacled creature, we later discover, is Aycayia, an indigenous woman turned into a mermaid many years before by her own women in a jealous attempt to stop her beguiling their men.

Costa Book Award winner 2021, The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey — Costa Book Award winner 2021, *The Mermaid of Black Conch* by Monique Roffey

Later, when Aycayia is yanked from the sea by American tourists as part of a macho fishing competition and strung up on the harbour for all to see – ‘her head hanging downwards, her deadly hair trailing, her arms lashed with rope behind her back, her breasts naked’ – we do not expect a happy ending . But Roffey has written a subversive tale. In Baptiste’s care, Aycayia is rescued, and nurtured. She sheds her fish scales and her tale, she learns to speak, and she once more, exercising, and enjoying, her considerable powers over the fisherman.

But as local suspicions grow around the new ‘woman’ seen near Baptiste’s home, and Aycayia experiences strange echoes of the ancient curse – in one epic scene, fish begin to rain down from the sky, an act Aycayia feels sure is connected to the curse – she asks David to take her back to the sea.

With a clever structure, a vivid cast of characters – from Porthos, the corrupt policeman, to Miss Rain, the complicated landowner and Miss Priscilla, the brilliantly nasty neighbour – and the kind of exquisitely rich language that makes you yearn to see the landscapes and people Roffey describes, The Mermaid of Black Conch is one of those novels that will capture your heart and make you want to return to it again, and again.