Harold Sonny Ladoo

Harold Sonny Ladoo (4 February 1945 – 17 August 1973) was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.

Biography Ladoo was born and grew up in an environment much like the world of his novels. He was born in Trinidad into extreme poverty, and immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968 to study English at Erindale College of the University of Toronto. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973.

It was during his time in university that he wrote his first and most notable novel, No Pain Like This Body, published in 1972. Described by David Chariandy and "an unusually strong first novel", it is the vivid story of a young boy growing up in a small Caribbean rice-growing community. The book focuses on the day-to-day struggles of a single family through illness, storm, and violence during the August rainy season. The writing is raw and often naïve yet manages to create a visceral experience.

His second book, Yesterdays (posthumously published, 1974),

An essay on Indo-Caribbean authors contrasted Ladoo's work with that of Sasenarine Persaud, neither of them ever having had direct experiences with India; Persaud integrated spiritual and aesthetic elements of Indian high culture into his writing, while Ladoo's writing of his colonial environment featured "naturalistic detail, black humour, and the grotesque". Scholar Victor Ramraj described Ladoo as being unique from fellow Indo-Caribbean writers Neil Bissoondath, Rabindranath Maharaj, Ismith Khan, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon: Ladoo's use of Creole dialect is a departure from older Caribbean fiction.

Naipaul, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and others, used the polished language of the coloniser and showed in doing so that they were equal to the British writers who made a name for themselves. Ladoo, on the other hand, shows his confidence by selecting Creole, as if to say, "This is the dialect of the common man, why should I try to gentrify it?" In doing so, he achieves an authenticity that is furthered by the immersion of his characters in the kind of vocabulary and sentence structure that the poverty-stricken people would use. In addition, his use of onomatopoeia heightens the effect of the sounds of movement in people and nature, and increases the animism that makes the characters even more authentic. Indigenous people all over the world have believed in the almost god-like power of nature. Ladoo amplifies this distinctive belief in the intentionality given to thunder or lightning or reptiles.

The University of Toronto Mississauga campus (formerly Erindale College) offers to students The Harold Sonny Ladoo Book Prize for Creative Writing every year.