Taíno Mendez is a Margate-based writer and performer. They are the author of Rainbow Milk (Dialogue), which was a 2020 Observer Best Debuts pick, shortlisted for the Gordon Burn, Jhalak and Polari First Book prizes.
They write reviews and personal essays for the London Review of Books, and have contributed fiction and non-fiction pieces to Art Review, Esquire, The Face, Frieze, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and WritersMosaic. They are working on their second novel.
Taíno Mendez: 'I feel absolutely liberated by writing fiction, even if I’m using my own material as a source.'
In conversation with Colin Grant
26th May 2021
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'We really must be living in strange times if we go to watch Othello for jokes. But perhaps laughter is the only way to deal with grief.'
31st December 2025
An exploration of the cognitive dissonance Fanon understood that black people experience in pursuing assimilation that leads to loss of identity and authenticity.
28th November 2025
The rewards of reading the deliberately complex texts of the Antillian philosopher Édouard Glissant
26th November 2025
What are Caribbean nations owed with the rise of extreme weather events?
12th November 2025
Reviving Wesley Brown's 1970s novel, a critique of masculinity and the American Dream that was way ahead of its time.
22nd May 2025
Mendez on Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, Endlessness by Nala Sinephro, Studio Richter Mahr, Donald Rodney at Whitechapel Gallery, and the film Neptune Frost.
16th April 2025
Steve McQueen co-curates a photographic exhibition marking ‘The Golden Age of Resistance’
2nd April 2025
Mendez on James Baldwin. Mendez is a London-based novelist and critic. Their novel, Rainbow Milk, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize.
17th September 2023
How does Black youth escape the social architecture of the open prison that is the urban centre?
11th May 2022
"One day I hope to be able to write purely for beauty’s sake, to run free in language and celebrate the sublime."
Taíno Mendez is a novelist, essayist and screenwriter.
Image credit: Mendez by Christa Holka
Educating myself to see beyond the stereotypes of the black man as presented through history.
19th May 2021
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