Wil Roach has completed the first book of a three-part memoir, Black Gay  Underage: a Memoir of London. He has also had several short stories and essays published online.

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As a poet, Wil appeared at the Sydney Writers Festival (2015), and has participated in and won several local spoken word events. He has produced three one-man shows with childhood themes, including in Sydney (2016) and the Adelaide Fringe Festival (2017). Wil is currently researching race, masculinity and sexuality for a series of long form essays. 

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Wil on writing memoir:

 

"Writing enables me to give voice to my untold stories, those that have existed for longer than I can remember. Ghost stories that I thought would remain shrouded in mystery have developed my writer’s voice so that these memories are made flesh and have then taken shape on the page. Now I can see myself more clearly and without sadness.

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I owe my passion for telling and enacting stories to my parents and countless unseen but not unknown ancestral presences. I give the highest praise to them. When I was itching to escape from my father’s endless re-telling of how he met my mother or went to school barefoot during Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial era, little did I know that I too, with initial reluctance and now with utter confidence, would be telling stories to others who sometimes itch to run away!

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Yet in setting my early childhood story to paper, I’ve healed the disappointment I felt when entering a library during my teenage years, I found none of my father’s stories or anything like them in any books I handled there. I would pull open a book, any book, in the hope that a suggestive title might unlock a glorious reflection on what I recognised as our Caribbean lives lived in London. For so many years this was not the case – until now, when my own story has been published to rectify some part of that vacuum in knowledge."