Jason will be reading from and talking about his first non-fiction book, The Possibility of Tenderness, a personal history and migration tale narrated through the lens of plants and dreams. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, and an archival detective story through time. Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain – and what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.  

The event will open with a drinks reception and Jason and Monique will be happy to sign copies of their books, which will be available for purchase on the night – including advance copies of The Possibility of Tenderness, which is published in March 2025.  

Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar, poet, and thinker shaping Afro-Diasporic futures through words and wisdom. He won the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for his collection Thinking with Tress and the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for Self-Portrait As Othello. His first non-fiction work is a fierce reclamation of a link with the land, roaming from Jamaican hills to the woodlands of Leeds. The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for readers of memoirs such as How To Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane’s nature writing. Jason is Professor in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. 

Monique Roffey has life-long links to Trinidad and the Caribbean with five novels set in the region, drawing on family biography, history, witness testimony and contemporary life, with elements of “the marvellous real”. Her acclaimed novel The Mermaid of Black Conch won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year award and was translated into fourteen languages. She is an environmental activist and co-founded Writers Rebel inside Extinction Rebellion. Passiontide, in which four women spark revolution on a Caribbean island, was published in June 2024. Monique is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

The event is presented in partnership between the Manchester Writing School, Manchester Poetry Library, Poetry Research Group and Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS) research centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, with Cornerstone Imprints at Penguin Random House and Blackwell’s University Bookshop. 

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