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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; born 17 August 1932) is a Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage of Bhumihar Brahmin known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism. He has also written works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays.

In 2001, Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has been awarded numerous other literary prizes, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1958), the Somerset Maugham Award (1960), the Hawthornden Prize (1964), the WH Smith Literary Award (1968), the Booker Prize (1971), the Jerusalem Prize (1983) and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature (1993).

J. M. Coetzee, writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, described Naipaul as "a master of modern English prose". In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".


Personal life

Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, to parents of Indian descent. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former Pakistani journalist.

Naipaul was married to the Englishwoman Patricia Hale for 41 years, until her death from cancer in 1996. According to an authorised biography by Patrick French, the two shared a close relationship when it came to Naipaul's work—she was an unofficial editor for him—but the marriage was not a happy one. Naipaul regularly visited prostitutes in London, and later had a long-term abusive affair with a married woman, Margaret Gooding, of which his wife was aware.

Prior to his wife's death, Naipaul proposed to Nadira Naipaul, a divorced Pakistani journalist, born Nadira Khannum Alvi. They were married two months after his wife died, at which point Naipaul also abruptly ended his affair with Gooding. Nadira Naipaul had worked as a journalist for the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, for ten years before meeting Naipaul. She was divorced twice, and has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha Naipaul and Nadir.

She is the sister of Maj Gen (Retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, a former chief of the Special Service Group – Pakistan Army, who was later assassinated during the War in North-West Pakistan.

Naipaul insists that his writing transcends any particular ideological outlook, remarking that "to have a political view is to be prejudiced. I don't have a political view." His supporters often see him as offering a mordant critique of many liberal pieties. His detractors, such as cultural critic Edward Said and poet Derek Walcott, accuse him of being a neo-colonial apologist. He has also excoriated Tony Blair as a "pirate" at the head of "a socialist revolution", a man who was "destroying the idea of civilisation in this country" and had created "a plebeian culture".

In March 2002, Salman Rushdie denounced Naipaul for supporting the RSS-, VHP- and BJP-led Indian government on the anti-Muslim 2002 Gujarat riots. Rushdie said Naipaul was "a fellow traveller of fascism and [he] disgraces the Nobel award".

Naipaul is a strict vegetarian.


Women

Naipaul attracted media controversy with statements about women he made in a May 2011 interview at the Royal Geographic Society, expressing his view that women's writing was inferior to men's, and that there was no female writer whom he would consider his equal. Naipaul stated that women's writing was "quite different", reflecting women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". He had previously criticised leading female Indian authors writing about the legacy of colonialism for the "banality" of their work.


Reception

In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:

Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.

His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Ideologue Edward Said, for example, argues that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classifies as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies". Said believes that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in the author's book-length essay The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness.

He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. In 1993 Naipaul was awarded the British David Cohen Prize for Literature.

In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul's sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. Theroux supposedly blamed Naipaul's second wife, Nadira Naipaul, for driving the two apart.

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 early 2007, V. S. Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of "Indian" and "African" and to concentrate on being "Trinidadian". In 2008, writer Patrick French released the first authorised biography of Naipaul, which was serialised in The Daily Telegraph.




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