Lakshmi Persaud

Lakshmi Persaud is a Trinidad-born, British-based writer who resides in London, England. She is the author of five novels: Butterfly in the Wind (1990), Sastra (1993), For the Love of My Name (2000), Raise the Lanterns High (2004) and Daughters of Empire (2012).

She was born in 1939 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.

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

She left Trinidad in 1957 to study for a B.A. and her Ph.D. at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland and her postgraduate Diploma in Education at University of Reading, United Kingdom. Her doctoral thesis was "The Need for and the Possibilities of Agricultural Diversification in Barbados, West Indies"

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

Dr. 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.

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