User:Kris Rampersad

Kris Rampersad is a writer, researcher, lecturer, journalist, publisher, activist and advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.

Kris Rampersad started as a freelance journalist at the Trinidad Guardian newspapers, before joining the staff of the Port of Spain headquarters, where she has worked in various capacities as reporter of health, education, culture and politics. She has written Guardian columns as Discover Trinidad and Tobago, Teenlife, Environment Friendly, In Gabilan, I Beg to Move, The Week That Was, The C Monologues as Literarily. She served as Editor of its U Magazine and Sunday Guardian Editor and holds awards in Journalism (BWIA Media Awards for Excellence in Journalism - Social and Economic Commentary and Pan American Health Journalism Award for Excellence in Health Reporting).

She also received a Nuffield Foundation Press Award at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, the Foreign Press Centre of Japan Fellowship and a Government of India ITEC Scholarship to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication where she received its highest, the Rajasthan Patrika Award. Her book Finding A Place explores, among other things, the relationship between journalism and fiction in West Indian literature, tracing antecedents to the works of authors like Seepersad Naipaul, VS Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Ismith Khan, Dennis Mahabir, among others.

She covered most of the the Jamaat al Muslimeen coup attempt involving activities at the Trinidad and Tobago Television for the Guardian.

She was one of the founding journalists at Newsday, following completion of a degree in literature at the University of the West Indies, and as a script and programme writer at AVM Television. At Newsday, Rampersad served as senior journalist and investigative reporter in politics and other social issues. She pioneered columns as Between the Lines.

In 2002, Kris Rampersad released Finding A Place, a ground-breaking study that gives context to much of Naipaul's perspectives on colonialism, the Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago, placing his writings within the context of some 200 years' gestation in Trinidad and its peculiar social, economic, political and literary evolution. She argues that the society's complex oral and literary antecedents propelled his acclamation as a 20th century Lord of the English language and that his, and his predecessors, including his father Seepersad Naipaul, legislator/authors as F.E.M Hosein, Dennis Mahabir, and near contemporaries as Samuel Selvon and Ismith Khan's early experiences of journalism on the island influenced their leanings towards expanding the literary tradition in social realism tradition.

Naipaul himself credited this work in a meeting with Rampersad on his visit to Trinidad in 2007, acknowledging that Finding a Place revealed aspects of writings by his father.

In the book Finding a Place, author, journalist, editor, journalist and academic, Kris Rampersad challenges and rejects the notion of East Indians to describe people of Indian heritage in the Caribbean and traces their migration and adaptation from hyphenated isolation inherent in the description Indo-Trinidadian or Indo-Caribbean for the unhyphenated integration into their societies as IndoTrinidadian and IndoCaribbean that embraces both their ancestral and their national identities.