Lakshmi Persaud

Lakshmi Persaud (20 September 1937 – 14 January 2024) was a Trinidad-born, British-based writer who resided in London, England. She was the author of five novels: Butterfly in the Wind, Sastra (1993), For the Love of My Name (2000), Raise the Lanterns High (2004) and Daughters of Empire (2012).

Personal life Lakshmi Persaud was born on 20 September 1937, in the small village of Streatham Lodge, later called Pasea Village, in what was then still rural Tunapuna, Trinidad. Her forefathers, Hindus from Uttar Pradesh, moved from India to the Caribbean in the 1890s. Both her parents were in the retail business.

Persaud attended the Tunapuna Government Primary School, St. Augustine Girls' High School and St. Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain.

Lakshmi Persaud was the wife of the late economist Professor Bishnodat Persaud, with whom she moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. Her three children are psychiatrist Rajendra Persaud, financial economist Professor Avinash Persaud, and economist and author Sharda Dean. She has lived mainly in the UK since the 1970s, with a two-year spell in Jamaica in the 1990s.

On 14 January 2024, Lakshmi died at her home in London after living with dementia since 2017. She was 86.

Career Persaud taught at various schools in the Caribbean including St. Augustine Girl's High School, Bishop Anstey High School and Tunapuna Hindu School in Trinidad, Queen's College in Guyana, and Harrison College and The St. Michael School in Barbados.

After leaving teaching she became a freelance journalist. Persaud wrote articles on socio-economic concerns for newspapers and magazines for many years. She also read and simultaneously recorded books in Philosophy, Economics and Literature for the Royal National Institute for the Blind in London. She began a new career in the late 1980s writing fiction. Her short story "See Saw Margery Daw" was broadcast by the BBC World Service on Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 November 1995.

Butterfly in the Wind, Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 1990. Sastra, Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 1993. For the Love of My Name, Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 2000. Raise the Lanterns High, London: BlackAmber Publishers, 2004. translated into Italian as Tenete alte le lanterne, Rome: 66thand2nd, 2010. Daughters of Empire, Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 2012.

Persaud’s novels deal with the intricacies of Caribbean identity and individual and communal memory.

Her first novel Butterfly in the Wind was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1990, and in it Persaud records the mental conflicts that attending a Catholic school caused for a Hindu girl. The novel deals in an imaginatively autobiographical way with the first 18 years of her life. Persaud records that her reading of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments and Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie were significant influences in writing this book.