The Trinidadian English writer V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul was born in1932 in Chaguanas, close to the Port of Spain on Trinidad, in a family descendedfrom Hindu immigrants from the north of India. His grandfather worked in a sugarcane plantation and his father was a journalist and writer. At the age of 18Naipaul travelled to England where, after studying at University College atOxford, he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1953. From then on hecontinued to live in England (since the 70s in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge)but he has also spent a great deal of time travelling in Asia, Africa andAmerica. Apart from a few years in the middle of the 1950s, when he was employedby the BBC as a free-lance journalist, he has devoted himself entirely to hiswriting.
Naipaul's works consist mainly of novels and short stories, but also includesome that are documentary. He is to a very high degree a cosmopolitan writer, afact that he himself considers to stem from his lack of roots: he is unhappyabout the cultural and spiritual poverty of Trinidad, he feels alienated fromIndia, and in England he is incapable of relating to and identifying with thetraditional values of what was once a colonial power.
The events in his earliest books take place in the West Indies. A few yearsafter the publication of his first work, The Mystic Masseur (1957), came what isconsidered by many to be one of his most outstanding novels, A House for Mr.Biswas (1961), in which the protagonist is modelled on the author's father.
After the enormous success of A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul extended thegeographical and social perspective of his writing to describe with increasingpessimism the deleterious impact of colonialism and emerging nationalism on thethird world, in for instance Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979),the latter a portrayal of Africa that has been compared to Conrad's Heart ofDarkness.
In his travel books and his documentary works he presents his impressions ofthe country of his ancestors, India, as in India : A Million Mutinies Now(1990), and also critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arabcountries such as Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan in Among the Believers(1981) and Beyond Belief (1998).
The novels The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are toa great extent autobiographical. In The Enigma of Arrival he describes how alanded estate in southern England and its proprietor, with a colonial backgroundand afflicted by a degenerative disease, gradually decline before finallyperishing. A Way in the World, which is a cross between fiction, memoirs andhistory, consists of nine independent but thematically linked narratives inwhich Caribbean and Indian traditions are blended with the culture encounteredby the author when he moved to England at the age of 18.
V.S. Naipaul has been awarded a number of literary prizes, among them theBooker Prize in 1971 and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1986. Heis an honorary doctor of St. Andrew's College and Columbia University and of theUniversities of Cambridge, London and Oxford. In 1990 he was knighted by QueenElizabeth.
A selection of works by V.S. Naipaul:
The Mystic Masseur. London: Deutsch, 1957.
Miguel Street. London: Deutsch, 1959.
A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Deutsch, 1961.
The Middle Passage : Impressions of Five Societies – British, French andDutch in the West Indies and South America. London: Deutsch, 1962.
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. London: Deutsch, 1963.
A Flag on the Island. London: Deutsch, 1967.
The Loss of El Dorado : A History. London: Deutsch, 1969.
In a Free State. London: Deutsch, 1971.
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. London: Deutsch, 1972.
Guerrillas. London: Deutsch, 1975.
India : A Wounded Civilization. London: Deutsch, 1977.
A Bend in the River. London: Deutsch, 1979.
A Congo Diary. Los Angeles, CA: Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980.
Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey. London: Deutsch, 1981.
The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking, 1987.
India : A Million Mutinies Now. London: Heinemann, 1990.
A Way in the World. London: Heinemann, 1994.
Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. London:Little, Brown, 1998.
Reading and Writing : A Personal Account. New York: New York Review of Books,2000.
Half a life. London: Picador, 2001.
Literature:
Theroux, Paul, V.S. Naipaul : an introduction to his work. London: Deutsch,1972.
Hamner, Robert, V.S. Naipaul. New York: Twayne, 1973.
Critical perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Ed. Robert D. Hamner. London:Heinemann, 1979.
Nightingale, Peggy, Journey through darkness : the writing of V.S. Naipaul.St. Lucia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1987.
Hughes, Peter, V.S. Naipaul. London: Routledge, 1988.
Jarvis, Kelvin, V.S. Naipaul : a selective bibliography with annotations,1957–1987. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow, 1989.
Kelly, Richard, V.S. Naipaul. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Weiss, Timothy F., On the margins : the art of exile in V.S. Naipaul.Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Dissanayake, Wimal, Self and colonial desire : travel writings of V.S.Naipaul. New York: P. Lang, 1993.
King, Bruce, V.S. Naipaul. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.
Levy, Judith, V.S. Naipaul : displacement and autobiography. New York:Garland, 1995.
Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. Ed. Feroza Jussawalla. Jackson: Univ. Pressof Mississippi, 1997.
Khan, Akhtar Jamal, V.S. Naipaul : a critical study. New Delhi: CreativeBooks, 1998.
Theroux, Paul, Sir Vidia's shadow : a friendship across five continents.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
