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V. S. Naipaul (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; b. 17 August 1932), in full, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, is a British writer born and raised in Trinidad, to which his grandfathers had emigrated from India as indentured servants. Naipaul is known for the wistfully comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker novels of a wider world remade by the passage of peoples, and the vigilant chronicles of his life and travels, all written in characteristic, widely admired, prose.

In 2001, V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Patricia Ann Hale, whom Naipaul married in 1955, served until her death 41 years later as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings. To her, in 2011, Naipaul dedicated his breakthrough novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, of a half-century before.

Background and early life: Trinidad

• A map of Trinidad showing Chaguanas just inward of the Gulf of Paria coast. County Caroni and Naparima (southwestern Trinidad), together fictionalized as County Naparoni in Naipaul's second published novel, The Suffrage of Elvira, are also shown.
• Map of the North-Western Provinces, India, from a history textbook published in 1880. Around the same time, Naipaul's paternal grandfather had emigrated from the eastern regions of the map or the adjoining terai regions of Nepal.
• Harvesting of sugarcane in a Trinidad sugar plantation shown in an 1836 lithograph. Slavery had ended a few years earlier. The indentured labourers from India would not arrive for another decade.
• Newly arrived indentured workers from India shown in an 1897 Trinidad photograph.

"Where there had been swamp at the foot of the Northern Range, with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland.... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away. "

Trinidad is the larger of the two main islands comprising Trinidad and Tobago (see map above); it is also the southernmost island in the Caribbean, its western peninsulas an eyeshot away from the northeastern coastline of Venezuela. Here, V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in the small town of Chaguanas on Trinidad's Gulf of Paria seaboard, a scant ten miles south of the Northern Range. He was the second child and first son born to mother Droapatie (née Capildeo) and father Seepersad Naipaul. A half-century earlier, his paternal grandfather had emigrated from India—from a village in the lower Gangetic Plain of the North-Western Provinces (see map)—to work as an indentured servant in the sugar plantations near Chaguanas. Some dozen years later, his maternal grandfather would do the same. During that same time, other Indians, their prospects blighted by the Great Famine of 1876–78, or similar calamities, had emigrated to other outposts of the British Empire, such as Fiji, Guyana, and Suriname, risking deathly sea voyages. In these places, as in Trinidad, although slavery had been abolished in 1833, slave labour was still in demand, and indenture was the subterfuge being employed to meet that demand.

His father, Seepersad Naipaul, however, had been able to carve out an unlikely career for himself; by dint of effort and the good fortune of receiving some education, he had become an English-language journalist in what was then a largely peasant Indian community. In 1929, he had begun contributing stories to the Trinidad Guardian, and in 1932, the year of his first son's birth, he became the provincial Chaguanas correspondent. In "A prologue to an autobiography," (1983), Naipaul describes how Seepersad's great reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned the dreams and aspirations of his eldest son, with Seepersad and Naipaul both immersed in an imaginary world of literature and Seepersad reading out aloud from the classics.

In the new world memory of their genealogy, the Naipauls were Hindu Brahmins. Their ancestors back in India had been guided by prohibitions, including, that against eating flesh. The new world, however, was to change some of that. By the time of Naipaul's earliest childhood memories, chicken and fish had become honorary vegetables at the family's dining table, and Christmas was celebrated with a big dinner. The sari, the draped female garment of timeless India, was in Trinidad not only being accessorized with belts and shoes, but its hemline had risen slightly in belated imitation of that of the skirt; for females of Naipaul's generation, the sari was to disappear altogether. Disappearing too were the languages of the old country. Naipaul and his siblings were encouraged to speak only in English. At school, other languages were taught, but these were usually Spanish and Latin.

It was such a changed and changing family that moved to Trinidad's capital Port of Spain when Naipaul was seven; his father was now working at the Guardian 's headquarters. However, in 1940, they would move again, to a communal house in Petit Valley, off the hills of the Northern Range, a few miles northwest of Port of Spain, returning finally to Port of Spain in 1943.

Education: Port of Spain and Oxford

• A lithograph made in 1836 of Port of Spain as viewed from the Gulf of Paria. Naipaul would move there, aged seven, in 1939.
• Queen's Royal College (QRC), the high school Naipaul attended in Port of Spain.
• A 1790 aquatint of High Street, Oxford, showing University College in the left foreground. A century and half later, V. S. Naipaul would spend four years at the college.
• The Spanish picaresque novella, Lazarillo de Tormes, which Naipaul read in sixth-from at QRC, translated into English at Oxford, and to which, he attributes in part his prose style.

"So I had my last lunch at home, with my mother and Uncle Bhakcu and his wife. Then back along the hot road to Piarco where the plane was waiting. I recognised one of the custom officers, and he didn't check my baggage.

The announcement came, a cold casual thing.

I embraced my mother.

I said to Bhakcu, "Uncle Bhak, I didn't want to tell you before, but I think I hear your tappet knocking."

His eyes shone.

I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac."

Naipaul was soon enrolled in Queen's Royal College (QRC), an urban, cosmopolitan, high performing school, which was designed and functioned in the fashion of an English boys' public school, with Naipaul enjoying his classes in Latin, French, Spanish, and Science. Still not quite 17, he won a Trinidad Government scholarship to study abroad. In the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of A House for Mr. Biswas, he reflected 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 simple degree in English. He went, he wrote, "in order at last to write...." In August 1950, Naipaul boarded a Pan Am flight to New York, continuing the next day by boat to London. He left Trinidad, like the narrator of Miguel Street, hardening himself to the emotion displayed by his family, and "not looking back," though, in old world fashion, he carried with him a baked whole chicken and roti bread made by his mother. For recording the impressions he was about to soak up, he purchased a pad of paper and a copying pencil, which a Pan Am stewardess sharpened for him, Naipaul noting, "I had bought the pad and pencil because I was travelling to become a writer, and I had to start." The copious notes and letters from that time were to become the basis for the chapter "Journey" in The Enigma of Arrival.

Arriving at Oxford for the Michaelmas term, 1950, Naipaul displayed enthusiasm, preparedness, and promise; he did so at least in his own estimation and the judgment of his Latin tutor, Peter Bayley. But, a year on, by his reckoning, his attempts at writing felt contrived. Unsure of his ability and his calling, and lonely besides, Naipaul fell into a slump. His family in Trinidad began to worry, and by late March 1952, plans were afoot for a return home in the summer. His father put down a quarter of the passage. But the return that summer never came to pass. In early April, in the vacs before the Trinity term, Naipaul took an impulsive trip to Spain, and quickly and grandly spent all he had saved. Attempting an explanation to his family, he called it "a nervous breakdown." Thirty years later, he was to call it "something like a mental illness."

Meanwhile, earlier that year, at a college play, Naipaul had met Patricia Ann Hale, a young woman his age, who was studying history. Hale and Naipaul soon became intimate. With her support, Naipaul began to recover and slowly again to write. In turn, she became a partner in dreaming up his career. When they told their families, however, the response was unenthusiastic; from hers it was even hostile. The couple did not stop seeing one another, but increasingly kept their intimacies under wraps. In June 1953, both Naipaul and Hale graduated, both receiving, in his words, "a damn, bloody, ... second." J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, however, thought Naipaul's Anglo-Saxon paper to have been the best in the university.

Back in Trinidad, Naipaul's father had had a coronary thrombosis in early 1953 and lost his job at the Guardian in the summer. Then, in October 1953, Seepersad Naipaul died. By Hindu tenets, it fell on Naipaul to light the funeral pyre—it was the mandatory ritual of the eldest son, the highest duty. But since there was not the time nor the money for Naipaul to return, his eight-year-old brother, Shiva Naipaul, performed the final rites of cremation. "The event marked him," Naipaul wrote about his brother. "That death and cremation were his private wound."

1954–56: London, Caribbean Voices, marriage, novel

• In the months after graduation, Naipaul applied, without success, to dozens of companies, including the Western India Match Company, which controlled "3/4 of the match industry in India, Burma, Ceylon and Pakistan," he wrote to his mother, continuing optimistically: "Jobs like that are fairly easy to come by."
• Pauline Henriques and Samuel Selvon reading a story on BBC's Caribbean Voices in 1952. In December 1954, Henry Swanzy, gave Naipaul his long-awaited break, a three-month, renewable, job presenting that programme. Naipaul was to stay in that position for four years.
• St Julian's Road in Kilburn, London, to which Naipaul moved in early January 1955. On 10 January, Pat Hale and Vidia Naipaul were married. Naipaul's Caribbean Voices colleague Gordon Woolford was one of two witnesses.
• Sitting in the BBC freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel one summer afternoon in 1955, Naipaul typed out the first story of Miguel Street. In the BBC club that evening, Gordon Woolford read the story slowly, displaying affect, offering unspoken approval.

"The freelancers' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart’s Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn’t rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun."

Through the summer and autumn of 1953 Naipaul was financially strapped, his prospects for employment in frugal post-war Britain unpromising, his applications to jobs overseas repeatedly rejected, and his attempts at writing still haphazard and running into dead ends. He was feeling the pressure of his family in Port of Spain, which was now expecting the newly minted graduate to help out. Working off and on at odd jobs, borrowing money from Pat or his family in Trinidad, Naipaul reluctantly enrolled for a B. Litt. post-graduate degree at Oxford in English Literature, with focus on Spanish literature. In December 1953, he failed his first B. Litt. exam. Although he passed the second written examination, his viva voce, in February 1954, with F. P. Wilson, an Elizabethan scholar and Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, did not go well. He was failed overall for the B. Litt. degree. According to Naipaul's authorized biographer Patrick French, Wilson was "a retired professor ... who was renowned for being taciturn and socially awkward." and that Naipaul blamed Wilson for failing him—in Naipaul's words—"deliberately and out of racial feeling." However, according to Wilson's ODNB biographers, Wilson retired later, in 1957, and was, "a master of social graces and a witty conversationalist."

Now indigent, Naipaul moved to London, where he gratingly accepted shelter in the flat of a cousin. Pat, who in the mean time had won a scholarship for further studies at the University of Birmingham, moved out of her parents' flat to independent lodgings, where Naipaul could visit her. For the remainder of 1954, Naipaul showed snatches of behavior—some characteristic of later years, some not—that tried the patience of his ragtag support group. He railed against Trinidad and Trinidadians; he railed at the British who he felt had plucked him out of Trinidad and left him hanging, without opportunity; he took refuge in illness, but when help was offered, he often rebuffed it. He was increasingly dependent on Pat, who kept calm and carried on, offering him in equal measure money, practical advice, encouragement, and rebuke, but all the while firmly expressing her love. But in spite of efforts made by friends, no gainful employment appeared. Then, in December 1954, Naipaul got his lucky break. Henry Swanzy, producer of the BBC weekly program, Caribbean Voices, offered Naipaul a three-month renewable contract as presenter of the program. Swanzy, on whose program a generation of Caribbean writers had debuted, including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, the 19-year-old Derek Walcott and, earlier, Naipaul himself, was being transferred to Accra to manage the Gold Coast Broadcasting System. Naipaul would stay in the part-time job for four years, and Pat would remain the critical breadwinner for the couple.

In January 1955, Naipaul moved to new lodgings, a small flat in Kilburn, and he and Pat got married, neither telling their families or friends—their wedding guests limited to the two witnesses required by law. Pat, continued to live in Birmingham, but visited on the weekends. At the BBC, Naipaul presented the program once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews. The sparsely furnished freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel flowed with the banter of Caribbean writers and would-be writers, providing camaraderie and fellowship. Still, for Naipaul, the writer's life, that "fair reward for the long ambition", seemed out of grasp. Then, one afternoon in the summer of 1955, in such surroundings, inspiration struck, and Naipaul typed out in one sitting a 3,000-word story based on a Port of Spain memory of a man, preternaturally placid, called Bogart in the story. Three fellow writers, John Stockbridge, Andrew Salkey, and Gordon Woolford, who read the story later, were struck by it and encouraged him to go on. In five weeks, Naipaul had written his first publishable book, Miguel Street, a collection of linked stories of that Port of Spain street. Although the book would not be published right away, Naipaul's talent caught the attention of publishers and his spirits began to lift.

1956–58: Trinidad visit, Cement and Concrete, New Statesman

• HMS Cavina, the peacetime Elders&Fyffes passenger-carrying banana boat, shown in 1941, requisitioned for World War II. In August 1956, Naipaul returned on TSS Cavina to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family.
• Angry at Andre Deutsch, for taking too long to publish The Mystic Masseur, Naipaul wrote The Suffrage of Elvira very quickly.
• In the summer of 1957, Naipaul began work as an editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association. Shown in the picture is a "Man on the Job" leaflet published by the association in 1958. In the summer of 1957, Naipaul began work as an editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association. Shown in the picture is a "Man on the Job" leaflet published by the association in 1958.
• Hired on the recommendation of Anthony Powell, Naipaul reviewed books once a month for the New Statesman from 1957 to 1961.

Diana Athill, Naipaul's editor at Andre Deutsch, liked Miguel Street, but the publisher, Andre Deutsch himself, thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain. He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel instead. Without enthusiasm, and also disconsolate, Naipaul wrote The Mystic Masseur quickly in Autumn 1955. On 8 December, 1955, Naipaul's novel was accepted by the publisher, Naipaul receiving a £125 payment, and wiring Trinidad, "NOVEL ACCEPTED LOVE. VIDO"

In late August 1956, six years after arriving in England, three years after his father's death, and in the face of much pressure from his family in Trinidad, especially his mother, to visit, Naipaul boarded an Elders&Fyffes passenger-carrying banana boat in Bristol. His first letters back to Pat spoke to the wealth created in Trinidad during the intervening years, and the material gains on display, in contrast to the prevailing frugal economy in post-war Britain. Trinidad was in its last phase before decolonization, and there was a new found confidence, and a more strident assertion of rights and privileges, both among the majority black community and the minority Indian community of the island. However, there were also more avowals of racial separateness—in contrast to the fluid, open racial attitudes of Naipaul's childhood—and there was violence. In the elections of 1956, the party supported by the majority blacks and Indian Muslims narrowly won, leading to an increased sense of gloom in Naipaul. This showed not only in his letters back to Pat, but in his excessive churlishness and criticism of his family, especially his sisters, during his stay. Naipaul accompanied a politician uncle, a candidate of the primarily-Hindu party, to his campaign rallies. During these and other events he was also gathering ideas for later literary use. By the time he left Trinidad, he had written to Pat about plans for a new novelette on a rural election in Trinidad. These ideas would transmute upon his return to England into the comic novel The Suffrage of Elvira.

Back in England, Deutsch informed Naipaul that the The Mystic Masseur would not be published for another ten months. Naipaul's anger at the publisher coupled with his anxiety about surviving as a writer roused more creative energy: The Suffrage of Elvira was written with great speed during the early months of 1957. Good news finally came in June with the publication of the Masseur. The reviews were generally complimentary, though some were patronizing; Naipaul copied out many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including the Daily Telegraph's, "V. S. Naipaul is a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do harm to either."

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Mystic Masseur  (1957) - film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)
• The Suffrage of Elvira  (1958)
• Miguel Street  (1959)
• A House for Mr Biswas  (1961)
• Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion  (1963)
• The Mimic Men  (1967)
• A Flag on the Island  (1967)
• In a Free State  (1971) - Booker Prize
• Guerrillas  (1975)
• A Bend in the River  (1979)
• The Enigma of Arrival  (1987)
• A Way in the World  (1994)
• Half a Life  (2001)
• The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories) – (2002)
• Magic Seeds  (2004)

Non-fiction

• The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
• An Area of Darkness (1964)
• The Loss of El Dorado  (1969)
• The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
• India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
• A Congo Diary (1980)
• The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
• Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
• Finding the Centre: Two Narratives  (1984)
• A Turn in the South (1989)
• India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
• Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)
• Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)
• The Masque of Africa (2010)

Notes

1. ^ Pronunciation: /ˈvɪd.jɑːˌdər/ /ˈsuːˌrədʒ//ˌprəˈsɑːd/ (two words are concatenated in the second name) Meaning: vidiādhar (Hindi "possessed of learning," (p. 921) from vidyā (Sanskrit "knowledge, learning," p. 921) + dhar (Sanskrit "holding, supporting," p. 524)); sūrajprasād (from sūraj (Hindi "sun," p. 1036) + prasād (Sanskrit "gift, boon, blessing," p. 666)) from McGregor, R. S. (1993), The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.
2. Chotiner 2012: Quote: "I(saac) C(hotiner): You don’t consider yourself a religious believer, is that correct? VSN: I am not religious, no."
3. Marnham 2011: Quote: "In your own childhood was religion important? No. I actually have no belief. I was very fortunate that way. It would have been a drag on one's intellectual development." sfn error: no target: CITEREFMarnham2011 (help)
4. Naipaul 1991: Quote: "Because my movement within this civilization has been from the periphery to the center, I may have seen or felt certain things more freshly than people to whom those things were everyday. One such thing was my discovery, as a child, a child worried about pain and cruelty, my discovery of the Christian precept, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. There was no such human consolation in the Hinduism I grew up with, and—although I have never had any religious faith—the simple idea was, and is, dazzling to me, perfect as a guide to human behavior. A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit."
5. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001". Nobelprize.org.
6. Naipaul 1987, p. 352. sfn error: multiple targets (3×): CITEREFNaipaul1987 (help)
7. French 2008, p. 3:"At the tip of the (Caribbean) chain lies a larger island which, beneath the sea or geologically, is a part of the South American mainland. Almost square, with a low promontory at its south-western corner pointing to Venezuela, this is Trinidad."
8. French 2008, pp. 1–14.
9. Hayward 2002, p. 8.
10. ^ French 2008, p. 12.
11. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p. 515,a: Quote: "A majority of the emigrants were from rural areas and from 'overcrowded agricultural districts' where 'crop failure could plunge sections of the village community into near-starvation'. In fact, there was a strong correlation between emigration and harvest conditions. Acute scarcity during 1873-5 in Bihar, Oudh and the North West Provinces provoked large-scale emigration through the port of Calcutta. The famine in south India during 1874-8 also resulted in heavy emigration."
12. Visaria & Visaria 1983, p. 515,b: Quote: "Most of the emigrants probably left even their villages of origin for the first time in their lives, and they were not fully aware of the hardships involved in long voyages and in living abroad. Diseases — cholera, typhoid, dysentery — were often rampant in depots or temporary abodes for labourers at ports of embarkation and also on ships. Consequently, mortality among the recruits and emigrants was very high. The data on long voyages to British Guiana and the West Indies clearly show that mortality at sea was alarmingly high. Before 1870, on an average about 17 to 20 per cent of the labourers departing from Calcutta port died on the ships before reaching their destination."
13. French 2008, p. 5: "When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834 and cheap labour was needed for the sugar-can plantations, malnourished Indians were shipped over from Calcutta and Madras. ... (Black agricultural labourers found their wages being undercut. They looked down on the Indians, who had to work long hours in the cane fields, as the 'new slaves'."
14. French 2008, p. 18:"There was talk of him (Seepersad) becoming a pundit, and he learned some Sanskrit. Soookdeo Misir, ... gave him a basic education. ... by the time he was in his late teens, he had escaped from the likely future as an agricultural labourer in the grim depths of the rural Indian community. He had taught himself how to read and write English, and had conceived the idea of becoming a journalist, a profession that was usually open to Whites and Negroes."
15. French 2008, p. 19: "In 1929, the year of his marriage, Seepersad began work as a freelance reporter on the Trinidad Guardian, ..."
16. Hayward 2001, p. 7. sfn error: no target: CITEREFHayward2001 (help)
17. French 2008, pp. 36–37: "Vido spent much of his time at Petit Valley with Pa, who would read to him and sometimes to other children: extracts from Julius Caesar, Nicholas Nickleby, Three Men in a Boat, ... Pa and Vido positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world derived from European literature ... Aspiration and ambition became the alternative to daily life ..."
18. ^ Naipaul 1983c.
19. French 2008, pp. 23–25:"The three surviving photographs of Capildeo Maharah (Naipaul's maternal grandfather) show him looking distinctly Brahminical. ... He wears white clothing befitting his caste, his shoes are unlaced to indicate that he has not touched leather with his hand, ... This physical evidence, combined with the certainty that he knew Sanskrit, make his claimed family lineage highly plausible. ... Seepersad's antecedents are vague; he never liked to discuss his childhood. ... Nyepaul (Naipaul's paternal grandfather) may have been a pure Brahmin, a Brahmin-by-boat, or he may have come from another caste background altogether. ... V. S. Naipaul never addressed this inconsistency, preferring to embrace the implied "caste sense" of his mother's family, ..."
20. French 2008, p. 55a.
21. French 2008, p. 55b: Hinduism had regulations on all things: clothing, ritual pollution, caste distinction, bodily functions, diet. The Naipaul family were not vegetarian, as most Brahmins are supposed to be; they sometimes ate meat, and treated chicken as a vegetable. At Christmas they would celebrate with baked fowl, dalpuri, nuts and fruit."
22. French, pp. 208–209: (caption) Above left: "Vidia with his glamorous sisters, ... Long gone were the days of covered heads and traditional dress for Indian women in Trinidad. Above right: Ma (Naipaul's mother) in heels with an Oxford-returned Vidia, 1956." sfn error: no target: CITEREFFrench (help)
23. French 2008, p. 26: "What Nanie (Naipaul's maternal grandmother) said, went. .... (quoted) 'Nanie believed in the Hindu way of life but the irony of it is, she would help with the churches and celebrate all the Catholic festivals ... She told us that she wanted us to speak in English, not Hindi, because we had to be educated.'"
24. French 2008, pp. 29–37.
25. French 2008, p. 30: "Nanie had bought a house, 17 Luis Street, in the Port of Spain suburb of Woodbrook ... This coincided with Seeperdad's recovery from his nervous breakdown, and his success in 1938 in regaining his job as a Guardian journalist. It was decided that the Naipaul family ... would move to Luis Street."
26. French 2008, pp. 32–33: "The idyll could not last. In 1940, Seepersad and Droapatie were told by Nanie that they would be moving to a new family commune at a place called Petite valley. ... In 1943, Seepersad could stand it no longer at Petit Valley and the Naipaul family moved in desperation to 17 Luis Street.
27. French 2008, pp. 40–41: "QRC was modelled on an English boys' public school, and offered a high standard of education. ... He enjoyed his classes n Latin, French, Spanish and Science. It was a highly competitive school, with metropolitan values. Caribbean dialect was ironed out in favour of standard English, although the students remained bilingual ...."
28. ^ French 2008, p. 67.
29. French 2008, p. 73: "Vidia thought that the quality of the education he had received at QRC put him ahead of his (Oxford) contemporaries. ... Peter Bayley remembers Vidia reading a later essay on Milton's Paradise Lost ... 'I knew I had a winner.'"
30. French 2008, p. 93: "When Vidia got back to England, he was in a bad state. Trinidad was off. 'The fact is,' he admitted, 'I spent too much money in Spain. And, during the nervous breakdown (yes, it was that) I had, I grew rash and reckless ... My only opportunity of recuperating from my present chaos is to remain in England this summer and live very cheaply.'"
31. Jussawala 1997, p. 126: "As Oxford he continued to suffer. 'I drifted into something like a mental illness,' he would wite." sfn error: no target: CITEREFJussawala1997 (help)
32. French 2008, p. 115.
33. Naipaul 1987, p. 346. sfn error: multiple targets (3×): CITEREFNaipaul1987 (help)
34. ^ French 2008, pp. 117–128.
35. Robertson & Connell 2004. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFRobertsonConnell2004 (help)
36. French 2008, p. 118:"Pat thought he needed to hurry up. 'If you haven't written in amongst the hurly burly you never will and what you write will never really be good. ...' She advised him not to get into debt, and asked him to send £1 that he owed her. Her affection was undimmed. 'I'm an absolute fool when you're concerned and (not to be told to your enormous ego) I really adore and worship that stupid expression ...'"
37. ^ French 2008, pp. 155–156.
38. French 2008, p. 160.
39. French 2008, p. 163.
40. French 2008, pp. 164–165.
41. French 2008, p. 165.
42. French 2008, pp. 167–168.
43. French 2008, p. 169.
44. ^ French 2008, pp. 171–172.
45. French 2008, p. 173.
46. French 2008, pp. 174–175.

Cited references

Books

• Dooley, Gillian (2006), V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer, University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 978-1-57003-587-6, retrieved 30 September 2013
• French, Patrick (2008), The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, New York: Alfred Knopf, ISBN 978-0-307-27035-1, retrieved 19 September 2013
• Gorra, Michael (2008), After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-30476-2, retrieved 19 September 2013
• Hayward, Helen (2002), The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul, (Warwick University Caribbean Studies), Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-4039-0254-2
• Jussawalla, Feroza F. (editor) (1997), Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, Univ. Press of Mississippi, ISBN 978-0-87805-945-4 {{citation}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Mustafa, Fawzia (1995), V. S. Naipaul: Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-48359-9, retrieved 19 September 2013
• Naipaul, Shiva (1986), "Brothers", An Unfinished Journey, London: Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 978-0-241-11943-3, retrieved 19 September 2013
• Naipaul, V. S. (1983a), "Foreword", A House for Mr. Biswas with a new foreword by the author, New York: Alfred Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-679-44458-9
  • Also:Naipaul, V. S. (1983b). "Writing 'A House for Mr. Biswas'". The New York Review of Books, 24 November 1983. {{cite journal}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)
• Naipaul, V. S. (1986), "A prologue to an autobiography", Finding the Center: Two Narratives, Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-394-74090-4, retrieved 19 September 2013
  • Also: Naipaul, V. S. (1983c), "A prologue to an autobiography", Vanity Fair, April 1983 {{citation}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)
• Naipaul, V.S. (1987), The Enigma of Arrival, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 978-0-307-74403-6, retrieved 28 September 2013
• Naipaul, V.S. (2007) , Gillon Aitken (ed.), Between Father and Son: Family Letters, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6, retrieved 19 September 2013
  • Also: Aitken, Gillon (2007) , "Introduction", in Gillon Aitken (ed) (ed.), Between Father and Son: Family Letters, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, ISBN 978-0-307-42497-6, retrieved 19 September 2013 {{citation}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• Nixon, Rob (1992), London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-536196-4, retrieved 19 September 2013
• Robertson, Jean; Connell, P. J. (rev) (2004), "Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963)'", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, retrieved 27 September 2013
• Said, Edward W. (2000), "Bitter Dispatches from the Third World", Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, p. 98, ISBN 978-0-674-00302-6, retrieved 19 September 2013

Articles

• Bayley, John (9 April 1987). "Country Life". The New York Review of Books.
• Buruma, Ian (20 November 2008). "Lessons of the Master". The New York Review of Books.
• Chotiner, Isaac (7 December 2012), V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write, New Republic
• Fraser, Peter D. (2010), "Review of V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer by Gillian Dooley", Caribbean Studies, 38 (1), Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus: 212–215
• Marnham, Patrick (April 1994), An Interview with VS Naipaul, Literary Review
• Naipaul, V. S. (17 October 1974). "Conrad's Darkness". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 February 1987). "The Ceremony of Farewell". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (23 April 1987). "On Being a Writer". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (31 January 1991). "Our Universal Civilization". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 May 1994). "A Way in the World". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (18 February 1999). "Reading and Writing". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (4 March 1999). "The Writer in India". The New York Review of Books.
• Pritchard, William H. (2008), "Naipaul Unveiled: Review of The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French", The Hudson Review, 61 (3): 431–440
• Robertson, Jean; Connell, P.J. (rev) (2004), "Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963)'", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, retrieved 27 September 2013
• Visaria, Pravin; Visaria, Leela (1983), "Population (1757–1947)", in Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, ca. 1757–ca. 1970, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-22802-2

External links

• Nobel Lecture: Two Worlds at NobelPrize.org
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• V. S. Naipaul on Charlie Rose
• V. S. Naipaul at IMDb
• Template:Worldcat id
• Jonathan Rosen, Tarun Tejpal (Fall 1998). "V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154". The Paris Review.

Awards received by V. S. Naipaul

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1901–1920 1901: Sully Prudhomme 1902: Theodor Mommsen 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906: Giosuè Carducci 1907: Rudyard Kipling 1908: Rudolf Eucken 1909: Selma Lagerlöf 1910: Paul Heyse 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann 1913: Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915: Romain Rolland 1916: Verner von Heidenstam 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919: Carl Spitteler 1920: Knut Hamsun 1921–1940 1921: Anatole France 1922: Jacinto Benavente 1923: W. B. Yeats 1924: Władysław Reymont 1925: George Bernard Shaw 1926: Grazia Deledda 1927: Henri Bergson 1928: Sigrid Undset 1929: Thomas Mann 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously) 1932: John Galsworthy 1933: Ivan Bunin 1934: Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1937: Roger Martin du Gard 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940 1941–1960 1941 1942 1943 1944: Johannes V. Jensen 1945: Gabriela Mistral 1946: Hermann Hesse 1947: André Gide 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1950: Bertrand Russell 1951: Pär Lagerkvist 1952: François Mauriac 1953: Winston Churchill 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1955: Halldór Laxness 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957: Albert Camus 1958: Boris Pasternak 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo 1960: Saint-John Perse 1961–1980 1961: Ivo Andrić 1962: John Steinbeck 1963: Giorgos Seferis 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968: Yasunari Kawabata 1969: Samuel Beckett 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971: Pablo Neruda 1972: Heinrich Böll 1973: Patrick White 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975: Eugenio Montale 1976: Saul Bellow 1977: Vicente Aleixandre 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979: Odysseas Elytis 1980: Czesław Miłosz 1981–2000 1981: Elias Canetti 1982: Gabriel García Márquez 1983: William Golding 1984: Jaroslav Seifert 1985: Claude Simon 1986: Wole Soyinka 1987: Joseph Brodsky 1988: Naguib Mahfouz 1989: Camilo José Cela 1990: Octavio Paz 1991: Nadine Gordimer 1992: Derek Walcott 1993: Toni Morrison 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe 1995: Seamus Heaney 1996: Wisława Szymborska 1997: Dario Fo 1998: José Saramago 1999: Günter Grass 2000: Gao Xingjian 2001–2020 2001: V. S. Naipaul 2002: Imre Kertész 2003: J. M. Coetzee 2004: Elfriede Jelinek 2005: Harold Pinter 2006: Orhan Pamuk 2007: Doris Lessing 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009: Herta Müller 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa 2011: Tomas Tranströmer 2012: Mo Yan 2013: Alice Munro 2014: Patrick Modiano 2015: Svetlana Alexievich 2016: Bob Dylan 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro 2018: Olga Tokarczuk 2019: Peter Handke 2020: Louise Glück 2021–present 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah 2022: Annie Ernaux 2023: Jon Fosse 2024: Han Kang 2025: to be determined v t e Recipients of the Booker Prize List of winners and nominated authors The Best of the Booker The Golden Man Booker International Booker Prize 1969–79 1969: P. H. Newby (Something to Answer For) 1970: Bernice Rubens (The Elected Member) 1970 Lost Prize: J. G. Farrell (Troubles) 1971: V. S. Naipaul (In a Free State) 1972: John Berger (G.) 1973: J. G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) 1974: Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday) 1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Heat and Dust) 1976: David Storey (Saville) 1977: Paul Scott (Staying On) 1978: Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea) 1979: Penelope Fitzgerald (Offshore) 1980s 1980: William Golding (Rites of Passage) 1981: Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) 1982: Thomas Keneally (Schindler's Ark) 1983: J. M. Coetzee (Life & Times of Michael K) 1984: Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac) 1985: Keri Hulme (The Bone People) 1986: Kingsley Amis (The Old Devils) 1987: Penelope Lively (Moon Tiger) 1988: Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda) 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) 1990s 1990: A. S. Byatt (Possession) 1991: Ben Okri (The Famished Road) 1992: Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger) 1993: Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) 1994: James Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late) 1995: Pat Barker (The Ghost Road) 1996: Graham Swift (Last Orders) 1997: Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) 1998: Ian McEwan (Amsterdam) 1999: J. M. Coetzee (Disgrace) 2000s 2000: Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin) 2001: Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang) 2002: Yann Martel (Life of Pi) 2003: DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little) 2004: Alan Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty) 2005: John Banville (The Sea) 2006: Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss) 2007: Anne Enright (The Gathering) 2008: Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) 2009: Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) 2010s 2010: Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question) 2011: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) 2012: Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies) 2013: Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries) 2014: Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) 2015: Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) 2016: Paul Beatty (The Sellout) 2017: George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) 2018: Anna Burns (Milkman) 2019: Margaret Atwood (The Testaments) and Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) 2020s 2020: Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain) 2021: Damon Galgut (The Promise) 2022: Shehan Karunatilaka (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) 2023: Paul Lynch (Prophet Song) 2024: Samantha Harvey (Orbital) v t e David Cohen Prize 1990s V. S. Naipaul (1993) Harold Pinter (1995) Muriel Spark (1997) William Trevor (1999) 2000s Doris Lessing (2001) Beryl Bainbridge and Thom Gunn (2003) Michael Holroyd (2005) Derek Mahon (2007) Seamus Heaney (2009) 2010s Julian Barnes (2011) Hilary Mantel (2013) Tony Harrison (2015) Tom Stoppard (2017) Edna O'Brien (2019) 2020s Colm Tóibín (2021)

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