66 Facts About VS Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, commonly known as V S Naipaul and, familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English.

VS Naipaul is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels.

VS Naipaul wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy.

VS Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State.

VS Naipaul won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour.

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VS Naipaul received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

In "A prologue to an autobiography", VS Naipaul describes how Seepersad's great reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned the dreams and aspirations of his eldest son.

VS Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital Port of Spain, at first when he was seven, and then more permanently when he was nine.

VS Naipaul attended the government-run Queen's Royal College, a high school, Port of Spain from 1942 to 1950.

VS Naipaul was enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, an urban, cosmopolitan, high performing school, which was designed and functioned in the fashion of a British boys' public school.

VS Naipaul reflected later that the scholarship would have allowed him to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but that he chose to go to Oxford to do a degree in English.

VS Naipaul left Trinidad, like the narrator of Miguel Street, hardening himself to the emotion displayed by his family.

In Trinidad, VS Naipaul's father had had a coronary thrombosis in early 1953, and lost his job at the Guardian in the summer.

VS Naipaul moved to London, where he reluctantly accepted shelter in the flat of a cousin.

VS Naipaul denounced Trinidad and Trinidadians; he castigated the British who he felt had taken him out of Trinidad but left him without opportunity; he took refuge in illness, but when help was offered, he rebuffed it.

VS Naipaul was increasingly dependent on Pat, who remained loyal, offering him money, practical advice, encouragement, and rebuke.

Swanzy, on whose program a generation of Caribbean writers had debuted, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, the 19-year-old Derek Walcott and, earlier, VS Naipaul himself, was being transferred to Accra to manage the Gold Coast Broadcasting System.

VS Naipaul would stay in the part-time job for four years, and Pat would remain the critical breadwinner for the couple.

In January 1955, VS Naipaul moved to new lodgings, a small flat in Kilburn, and he and Pat were married.

At the BBC, VS Naipaul presented the program once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews.

VS Naipaul accompanied a politician uncle, a candidate of the Hindu party, to his campaign rallies.

VS Naipaul claimed later that he was told those jobs were reserved for Europeans.

Not long after VS Naipaul began writing A House for Mr Biswas, he and Pat moved across town from their attic flat in Muswell Hill to an upstairs flat in Streatham Hill.

In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A House for Mr Biswas, and ten years after VS Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for literature, he dedicated the book to his late wife Patricia Anne Hale, who had died in 1996.

Dr Eric Williams, the Premier of Trinidad and Tobago, invited VS Naipaul to visit in early 1961 and to write a book on Caribbean history, published as The Middle Passage.

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VS Naipaul wrote a monthly "Letter from London" for the Illustrated Weekly of India from 1963 to 1965.

In September 1960, VS Naipaul was sounded out about visiting Trinidad as a guest of the government and giving a few lectures.

In Port-of-Spain, VS Naipaul was invited by Dr Eric Williams, Premier of Trinidad and Tobago within the short-lived West Indies Federation, to visit other countries of the region and write a book on the Caribbean.

VS Naipaul'story is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.

VS Naipaul was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had in Trinidad or England and this made him anxious.

VS Naipaul wrote a novella Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion, set in London, and based, in part, on his experiences working for the Cement and Concrete Association, and, in part, on his relationship with Pat.

VS Naipaul wrote a number of short stories which were eventually published in the collection A Flag on the Island.

VS Naipaul's evolving relationship with the hotel manager, Mr Butt, and especially his assistant, Mr Aziz, became the subject of the middle section of An Area of Darkness, Naipaul bringing his novelistic skills and economy of style to bear with good effect.

Just before he left India, VS Naipaul was invited by the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a prominent, established, English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter from London" for the magazine.

VS Naipaul served as writer-in-residence at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and finished his novel The Mimic Men.

VS Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.

In late 1964, VS Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie.

VS Naipaul spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named, "A Flag on the Island, " later published in the collection, A Flag on the Island.

VS Naipaul revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors there during a hurricane.

VS Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing.

VS Naipaul had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had.

Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island, VS Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men, though for almost a year he did not make significant progress.

Back in London in October 1966, VS Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little, Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain.

Central to VS Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America.

VS Naipaul had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies.

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VS Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties.

VS Naipaul showed interest in the clans of the Bagandan people.

When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote overthrew their ruler, the Kabaka of Buganda, VS Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough.

VS Naipaul travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux.

VS Naipaul met Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in 1972, and wrote critically of Borges in the New York Review of Books.

Short life and career of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian immigrant in the London underworld of the late 1960s, who returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s as a Black Power activist, Michael X, exemplified the themes VS Naipaul had developed in The Mimic Men and In a Free State.

In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, VS Naipaul, accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story.

VS Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him.

VS Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial.

Around the same time Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books to do some stories on Argentina.

In 1974, VS Naipaul wrote the novel Guerrillas, following a creative slump that lasted several years.

Naipaul covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Robert B Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans", an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States".

The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, where VS Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive.

VS Naipaul had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore.

VS Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.

Edward Said argued that VS Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".

The world VS Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour.

Fouad Ajami rejected the central thesis of VS Naipaul's 1998 book Beyond Belief, that Islam is a form of Arab imperialism that destroys other cultures.

VS Naipaul pointed to the diversity of Islamic practices across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

VS Naipaul was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State in 1971.

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VS Naipaul was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1990 New Year Honours.