Nobel-winning writer V.S. Naipaul dies aged 85

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LONDON: Renowned Nobel Prize-winning British author VS Naipaul, who wrote on the post-colonial traumas, has died at the age of 85.

Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and was the son of an Indian civil servant, was best known for works including “A House for Mr. Biswas” and the Man Booker Prize-winning “In a Free State.”

“Surrounded by the people he loved, he lived a life full of amazing creativity and endeavour,” his wife, Lady Nadra Naipaul, said in a statement on Saturday.

He clearly described the author as “a giant in all these things”.

Vidyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul settled in England and studied English literature at Oxford University on a scholarship.

But he spent much of his time traveling and, despite becoming a pillar of Britain’s cultural establishment, was also a symbol of his detachment from modern roots.

Naipaul’s early works focused on the West Indies, but included countries around the world.

He has stirred controversy in the past, describing post-colonial countries as “semi-structured societies” and arguing that Islam enslaved and sought to eradicate other cultures.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy described him as a “literary circulator, in his unique voice, only at home”.

It states that he was “an analyst of the fate of empires in a moral sense: what they do to men”.

It states that “his authority as a narrator is based on his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of conquest”.

Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990, mixed fiction, non-fiction and autobiography without distinction.

One of his seminal novels was “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961), which looked at the near-impossible task for Indian immigrants in the Caribbean of trying to integrate into society while holding on to their roots.

In total he wrote more than 30 books, and in 1971 was one of the first winners of the Booker Prize, now Britain’s highest literary award, for “In a Free State”.

– violent affair –

During his early career, Naipaul suffered from money problems and loneliness. He met his first wife, Pat, at Oxford, who became his constant literary support.

He died in 1996, and she later revealed that she felt he was too quick to publicly admit to his death, while she was battling cancer, that he often engaged in prostitution. .

The entry “ate it up. I think he had all the repetitions and everything after that…you could say I killed it,” Naipaul said. “What the World Is,” said British author Patrick French in an all-encompassing biography. Here it is: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul.

He had a quarter-century, sometimes violent, affair with an Argentine, and married Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi the same year Pat died.

He was famous and had a reputation for excluding people from his life, and once replied: “My life is short, I cannot listen to the forbidden.”

Naipaul’s rants ranged from corruption in Indian politics to the West’s abject treatment of its former colonies in “The Return of Eva Peron”.

He likened former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution, and also railed against “sentimental” female novelists.

“Women writers are different, they’re completely different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it’s by a woman or not,” she told the London Evening Standard. I think it’s unfair to me.” Standard newspaper in 2011.

He said it was because of women’s “emotions, a narrow view of the world”.

Naipaul also fell out with American travel writer Paul Theroux, who later wrote a bitter, no-holds-barred memoir of their long association. Later they resolved their differences.