ABOUT

MONTAGUE KOBBÉ is an ambilingual writer with a Shakespearean name, born in Caracas, in a country that no longer exists, in a millennium that is long gone. He has resided in London, Munich, Madrid, Florence, and Anguilla – a recondite Leeward Island to which he has had ties for over 30 years.

His debut novel The Night of the Rambler (Akashic: NYC, 2013) deals with revolution and human dignity, and it earned a mention in the 2014 Premio Casa de las Américas for best English or Creole-language Caribbean book. His second novel, On the Way Back is set in the Caribbean island of Anguilla, and tackles issues of racial and social prejudice with a dose of humour. His bilingual collection of flash fiction Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges (Dog Horn 2014) was adapted to the theatre and staged at the Cervantes Theatre in London in 2017.

He is the co-editor of Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela (Ragpicker Press, 2016), a collection of thirty texts by thirty Venezuelan authors, and the translator of a number of art books with the Spanish publisher La Fábrica.

As part of the collective Puerto Libre, he organised in 2019 and 2020 the Festival of Latin American Culture in Florence, Italy.

An expert chiromancer and telepathist, he wrote regularly between 2008 and 2018 for the Weekender supplement of Sint Maarten’s The Daily Herald newspaper. He has been published in The New York Times, the TLS, the Miami Herald, Venezuela’s El Nacional and Chile’s Mercurio among many others, and keeps track of his writing on the blog MEMO FROM LA-LA LAND.

Want to have a word? Send me a line to montycobbe [at] gmail [dot] com.