Home
Sasenarine Persaud is an award-winning Florida-based essayist, novelist, poet and short story writer, who originated the term Yogic Realism to describe his aesthetics. He is the author of 15 books of prose and poetry. His work and Yogic Realism has been the focus of a doctoral dissertation and a Master's thesis and included in a number of other dissertations and theses. His latest book, Mattress Makers, was published in June 2023 by Mawenzi House (Toronto).
Canadian Literature calls him “one of those rare poets who gets the recipe of humanness exactly right” and The Halifax Chronicle Herald “dauntlessly brainy…a bit like reading T.S. Eliot mixed up with Rabindranath Tagore…. Persaud’s poems are unapologetically learned.”
His awards include: The KM Hunter Foundation Award (Toronto), the Leslie Epstein Fellowship at Boston University and the 2018 Dharmic Arts and Humanities Award from HAF (Hindu American Foundation).
On his fiction, The Globe and Mail writes, “Persaud’s breathtaking narrative….nimbly pits self-ironizing postmodernism against the timeless values of narrative.”
Previous collections include Monsoon on the Fingers of God (2018); of Love in a Time of Technology (2014); Lantana Strangling Ixora (2011); In a Boston Night (2008); The Wintering Kundalini (2002); Canada Geese and Apple Chatney (1998, short stories); and A Surf of Sparrows' Songs (1996). He is also the author of two novels Dear Death (1990) and The Ghost of Bellow's Man (1992) and several essays published in the US, Canada, the UK, India and the UAE.
Anthologies in which Persaud's work has been published include: A World of Poetry (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2017); Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry (Commonwealth Education Trust, London, 2014); Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (TSAR, Toronto, 2012); The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket (Peepal Tree, Leeds, 2012); A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories (Marshall-Cavendish, Singapore, 2010); Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (Broadview, Peterborough, 2009); Anthology of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction (Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2007); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2000); and The Journey Prize Anthology: short fiction from the best of Canada’s new writers (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997).
Persaud's work has been published in eight countries, spanning four continents and is used in colleges and universities in Canada, England, Guyana, India, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the United States. Persaud was born in Guyana (South America) and has lived in Toronto for several years. He resides in Florida.