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Monique Roffey is a writer, lecturer and activist and has been writing for over twenty years. In this time, she's published seven books (a memoir and six novels), some short fiction, many essays and some literary journalism. Some of her books have been awarded prizes, or been nominated for prizes, such as, the Costa Fiction Award, 2020, and the Costa Book of the Year, 2020, for The Mermaid of Black Conch; it was also short-listed for the Rathbones Folio Award, 2021, the Goldsmiths Prize, 2020 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, 2021. In 2013, Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 2010. She teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Monique Roffey's website
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In an interview in The Guardian (London), you talked about your parents and their arrival in Trinidad—including the fact that your mother brought her green bicycle. How much of George and Sabine is based upon them? Was your mother as notorious for her bicycle riding as Sabine?
Yes, everyone knew my mother because she rode around Port of Spain on her green bicycle in her shorts, looking very glamorous and yet very foreign too. For months after she first arrived, she would go to parties or meet people for the first time and they would say "Oh, you're the women on the green bicycle," so she was well-known for her bike.
My parents had a long and eventful marriage and were always a bit like movie stars to me, when they were young. Yes, to some extent George and Sabine are based on them, but in many ways not at all. My mother had no interest in Eric Williams, for example, or the PNM, and she never attended the University of Woodford Square; all of that has to do with my own interest in Trinidad's recent history.
What did your parents think about Eric Williams?
To my knowledge and memory, they did not have strong opinions about him.
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