Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidad and Tobago-born award-winning writer, artist, and academic, who now lives between Barbados and the United Kingdom. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017, with her debut effort The Sweet Sop. The story is about a Trinidadian man reunited with his father, through chocolate. In 2020, Persaud's novel Love After Love, was published by Faber in the UK and One World, Random House in the USA. She has written for the magazines Granta, Prospect and Pree.
Writing Career
Persaud began writing in her 40s, after a successful career as a legal academic, visual artist and project manager. Persaud has written for National Geographic and self-published a novel If I Never Went Home in 2013, described as a family melodrama set in Boston and Trinidad.
Love After Love
The story set in modern day Trinidad centres the Ramdin-Chetan family, told from three separate perspectives: Betty Ramdin, her son Solo, and their lodger Mr Chetan. These characters form an unconventional household full of love and affection until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart. The novel asks us to consider what happens at the very brink of human forgiveness, and offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back. The book examines love in many iterations and also highlights the treatment of gay people in the Caribbean, the fragility of life as an undocumented migrant in the United States, as well as traditional religious beliefs contrasted with unconventional spirituality. Persaud's debut novel received critical acclaim including: "Persaud gives us a captivating interrogation of love in all its forms, how it heals and how it harms, the twists and torments of obsession, sex and romance, family, friendship, acceptance or rejection by the community, and so on", and received a 4 star review in The Telegraph, describing the book as "a vivacious tale of trouble in paradise". The title is of the novel refers to a poem by Caribbean author and poet Derek Walcott.
Persaud left Trinidadian at 18 and moved to the UK to study. She is married and resides with her husband, their twin sons, a couple of rescue dogs, and a feral chicken.
