Lakshmi Holmström
Lakshmi Holmström MBE was an Indian-British writer, literary critic, and translator of Tamil fiction into English. Her most prominent works were her translations of short stories and novels of the contemporary writers in Tamil, such as Mauni, Pudhumaipithan, Ashoka Mitran, Sundara Ramasami, C. S. Lakshmi, Bama, and Imayam. She obtained her undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Madras and her postgraduate degree from University of Oxford. Her postgraduate work was on the works of R. K. Narayan. She was the founder-trustee of SALIDAA – an organisation for archiving the works of British writers and artists of South Asian origin. She lived in the United Kingdom.
She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to literature.
She died of cancer on 6 May 2016.Awards and Scholarships
- 2000 Crossword Book Award in the Indian language fiction translation category for Karukku by Bama
- 2003–2006 Fellow, The Royal Literary Fund at University of East Anglia
- 2006 Crossword Book Award in the Indian language fiction translation category for In a Forest, A Deer by C. S. Lakshmi
- 2007 Iyal Virudhu Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Canada-based Tamil Literary Garden
- 2015 Crossword Book Award in the Indian language fiction translation category for Children, Women, Men by Sundara Ramaswamy
- 2016 The A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for translation from a South Asian language, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies for Children, Women and Men, originally published as Kuzhandaigal, Pengal, Aangal by Sundara Ramaswamy, Penguin Books India
