Lloyd Fernando

Lloyd Fernando was born in Sri Lanka in 1926, and in 1938, at the age of twelve, he migrated to Singapore with his family. This early migration across the Indian Ocean had an enriching influence on Fernando, the writer and scholar, as it was to plant the seeds of a transcultural, diasporic imagination in him at an impressionable age. Life was moving along at a steady pace, and Fernando continued his schooling at St Patrick's, but the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1943 to 1945 dealt a severe blow, interrupting his formal schooling and, most tragically, costing his father's life in one of the Japanese bombing raids. Following his father's death, Fernando started working as a trishaw rider, construction labourer and apprentice mechanic, to support himself and the family. He also joined the Ceylon branch of the Indian National Army, not impelled by any ideology but out of a sheer necessity for self-sustenance.