Sir V S Naipaul, who has died aged 85, was often cited as the greatest living writer in the English language and won almost every possible literary prize including, in 2001, the Nobel. A Trinidadian Indian, he had lived in England since he first came to the country to study at Oxford University in 1950. He will probably be best remembered for his fourth (and most autobiographical) novel A House for Mr Biswas, with its Trinidadian setting and its themes, typical of all his work: self-determination, exile, identity and the gradual disintegration of a post-colonial society. In latter years his personal reputation took a battering when an authorised biography was unstinting in its depiction of his failings. He was born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul at Chaguanas in Trinidad and Tobago on August 17 1932, the grandson of a Brahmin who came to Trinidad from Uttar Pradesh in India. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, who he adored, was a frustrated journalist on the Trinidad Guardian whose disappointment with life eventually led to a nervous breakdown. Along with five sisters, Vidia, as he was known, had one brother, Shiva, who was 12 years younger. He also became a well-known novelist but died in 1985 at the age of 40. Though the pair were not close, Naipaul having left Trinidad when his brother was five years old, he often said that this bereavement marked his emotional life permanently and that he measured all subsequent events by the date of his brother’s death.<doc-sep>The British author VS Naipaul has died at his home in London aged 85, his family said in a statement. Lady Naipaul said: "He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour." Salman Rushdie was among the literary figures who paid tribute on Saturday night with a tweet that hinted at the way Naipaul's prickly persona and unflinching prose could alienate friends and provoke admirers. "We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother," he wrote. "RIP Vidia." Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born to descendants of indentured Indians in colonial Trinidad in 1932. From there he rose to become one of the giants of Twentieth Century writing, publishing more than 30 books ranging from comic novels set in his homeland to memoir and travel writing.<doc-sep>Its first line captures Naipaul's belief that the world is what man makes it; responsibility for its failings impossible to escape: "The world is what it is", he wrote. "Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place it it."<doc-sep>The writer VS Naipaul, who explored questions of place and identity for more than half a century, has died aged 85. Turning from the comedy that began his career, Naipaul cast a steely eye on the shards of empire in a series of novels and travelogues. Unflattering portraits of the West Indies, India, Africa and the Islamic faith brought both hostility and acclaim. Critics accused him of holding people of the developing world in contempt even as his diamantine prose won him a series of awards including the Booker prize in 1971, a knighthood in 1989 and the Nobel prize for literature in 2001. Lady Nadira Naipaul confirmed that her husband had died peacefully in London. “He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” she said. Author Sir Salman Rushdie paid tribute to Naipaul, writing: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia.” Mail on Sunday editor and friend Geordie Greig told BBC Radio 4 that he was at Naipaul’s bedside when he died. “Nadira talked about a poem by Lord Tennyson, Crossing the Bar, which had great resonance and meaning to him and I just turned on my phone and found it and we read it.” He added: “He drifted off and it was peaceful and very sad but what a life, what an achievement, what a legacy.” Naipaul was born in 1932 to a family that had arrived in Trinidad from India in the 1880s, part of what he once called “an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World”. It was a community where he never felt at home, in 2008 recalling his childhood as “pretty awful” and his family as “terrible … very large, with too many people. There was no beauty. It was full of malice.” A government scholarship offered him a chance to escape, an immigrant once more as he travelled to Oxford in 1950 to study English. Having dreamed of a literary career since the age of 10, he hoped to “find out his material and miraculously become a writer” while studying for his “worthless degree”, but instead found only “solitude and despair”, as he told the Paris Review in 1998. “I was far too well prepared for it. I was far more intelligent than most of the people in my college or in my course.” Meanwhile Naipaul struggled to convert his ambitions into anything concrete, abandoning two novels as he graduated and began working at the BBC World Service, editing and presenting on the weekly Caribbean Voices slot. Sitting in the freelancers’ room at the broadcaster’s Langham House, a memory of a neighbour in Port of Spain rose up, and he began writing a story: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” He sat there at the typewriter as a story of a man living on a run-down street seemed to write itself, not daring to leave the room until he had finished. The next day he wrote another, and then another until in six weeks he had an entire collection of colourful stories. Unwilling to take a chance on short stories from an unknown writer, André Deutsch encouraged him to write a novel, The Mystic Masseur, which was published in 1957. But even as his debut novel won the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys prize, Naipaul was already turning his back on the light comedy that characterised his first three books. Casting around in desperation for a subject, he began telling the story of a man modelled on his father Seepersad, a journalist and aspiring writer who suffered a breakdown in 1933 and died 20 years later. A House for Mr Biswas charts the setbacks and indignities suffered by a man born to Indian parents in rural Trinidad, his struggles with his wife’s overbearing family and his search for a place he can call his own. Reviewing it for the Observer in 1961, Colin MacInnes marvelled at how Naipaul achieved the “splendid contradiction” of a work that was sad, at times horrific and terrifying, but “also funny, even hilarious”, and hailed a voice that “even when scornful or ironical, can be as tender, just, kind, delicate, filled with unassuming pity”. For Amitav Ghosh, writing in 2001, it was the last time Naipaul would “look at life outside the west on its own terms”. “After this,” Ghosh argued, “the richly textured islands of his early work would disappear, to be replaced by a series of largely interchangeable caricatures of societies depicted as ‘half-made’ in comparison with Europe.” Having exhausted the experience of his upbringing, Naipaul felt the need to move on. Invited in 1960 by the government of Trinidad and Tobago to visit the islands at their expense, Naipaul spent five months travelling through the West Indies and published an account of his voyage two years later. But The Middle Passage was not the hymn to a vibrant country on the cusp of independence that prime minister Eric Williams might have expected. Naipaul set the tone in an opening line that described his departure on the boat-train from Waterloo with “such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians” that he was “glad … [to be] travelling first class”. He journeys through Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Jamaica and Martinique, but is wearied by what he finds, seeing every day “the same things – unemployment, ugliness, overpopulation, race”. “History is built around achievement and creation,” he writes, “and nothing was created in the West Indies.” Critics in New York and London hailed Naipaul’s “ironical exposition and resigned analysis”, saluting a tone that they described as “critical but humane”, his “inevitable indignation” tempered with “an admirable sense of comedy”. But while the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott found Naipaul’s writing brilliant, he was doubtful about the results of an account seen through “Victorian spectacles”. “Everything is made to seem touching and ridiculous,” he wrote.<doc-sep>
Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) condoled the death of Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul (right) on Sunday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) condoled the death of Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul (right) on Sunday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday condoled the death of Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, who shared ancestral roots with India. Naipaul, 85, breathed his last in his London home on Saturday. Adding that Naipaul’s death is a “major loss to the world of literature,” Modi extended his condolences to the family. “Sir V S Naipaul will be remembered for his extensive works, which covered diverse subjects ranging from history, culture, colonialism, politics and more,” he wrote on Twitter. Sir VS Naipaul will be remembered for his extensive works, which covered diverse subjects ranging from history, culture, colonialism, politics and more. His passing away is a major loss to the world of literature. Condolences to his family and well wishers in this sad hour. — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 12, 2018 Read | Who was V S Naipaul President Ram Nath Kovind also expressed his condolences through Twitter, saying he was saddened to learn about the passing away of Naipaul, “whose books are a penetrative exploration of faith, colonialism and the human condition, in his home in the Caribbean and beyond”. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said whether one agrees or disagrees with him, Naipaul wrote beautiful prose. The world of words has lost an “artful master”, she wrote on Twitter. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, popularly known as Sir Vidia, was born in 1932 in Chaguanas on the island of Trinidad and Tobago, to a family that had arrived from India in the 1880s. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. He was famous for his novels like “A Bend in the River” and “A House for Mr Biswas.”