V. S. Naipaul

Who is V. S. Naipaul?

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indian descent, widely regarded as one of the most important novelists and essayists of the twentieth century. Born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, into a family descended from indentured laborers from India, he left for England in 1950 on a scholarship to study at Oxford University and settled there for most of his life. His breakthrough novel, "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), drew on his own family history to portray a Trinidadian Indian man's lifelong struggle for independence and identity, and is widely considered a landmark of postcolonial literature. He went on to write more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including "The Mimic Men," "In a Free State" (winner of the 1971 Booker Prize), and travel and political works examining postcolonial societies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, such as "The Enigma of Arrival" and "A Bend in the River." In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for uniting "perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." He was knighted in 1990.

Sources: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001 — official citation, NobelPrize.org · V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) · Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (2008)