Violet Dias Lannoy

Violet Dias Lannoy (1925–1973 wrote Pears from the Willow Tree, a posthumously published novel, besides short stories.

Biography Lannoy's parents were from Goa; her father, Josinho Dias, worked in Tanganyika as a civil servant, and her mother, Marina (Velho) Dias, came from Caranzalem. She and her siblings attended school in Belgaum and Bombay. She worked with Mahatma Gandhi in a refugee camp in the Punjab, was a teacher in North India for a while, and spent much of her life working all around the world, particularly for UNESCO, with, for a while, Paris as a base, where she lived in a small apartment on the Left Bank. For UNESCO she advised on educational matters in India, England, France, and East Africa. Her first husband was Behram Warden; her second husband, Richard Lannoy, was a British photographer and writer, author of The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 1971). She died in 1973 in St Albans, England, of a heart attack. When she died, her novel Pears from the Willow Tree was unpublished, as were some short stories; the novel was finally published by Three Continents Press in 1989, edited by C. L. Innes, who had become interested after hearing Peter Nazareth read a paper on his wife's life and work.

Literary work Lannoy's fiction reflects her life as a teacher and educator, and frequently her writing depicts teaching situations. Pears from the Willow Tree features a Catholic teacher from Goa, raised in the tradition of ideals derived from Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement. The title is derived from a proverb, "When a man is confused, he expects pears from the willow tree", which refers to the generation of people coming to terms with the conflict between their Gandhian idealism and the political reality of an independent India.

Literary critic Peter Nazareth selected "Roses in the Grass" for a special issue of Callaloo on Goan literature (and later for an anthology of Goan literature); it concerns Wwamba, an old man who does the gardening for a white school in Kenya, among the Kikuyu people. Nazareth called it a "carefully textured" story, in which the gardener teaches both the students and the first black school teacher, in a disguised fashion, how to overcome the alienation of life in a white, colonial school.