Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul dies

Trinidad-born author Sir VS Naipaul has died at his home in London, his family said in a statement on Saturday.
Mrs Nadira Naipaul said her 85-year-old husband, Sir Vidiadhar “Vidia” Surajprasad Naipaul, “…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.”
The British laureate has had a decorated career, winning both the Nobel and Booker Prizes for his work, which ranged from comics earlier on to post-colonial life. He had published over 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over the past 50-plus years.
His most celebrated novel, “A House for Mr Biswas”, was based on the life of his late father, Seepersad, who wrote for the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. The late VS Naipaul was also well known for his work on Islamic fundamentalism and travel writings.
Sir Naipaul was born in Trinidad, which was the setting for most of his earlier work, and went to study in the United Kingdom after winning a Government scholarship to study at a university in any country of the British Commonwealth. He chose Oxford’s University College, where he suffered a nervous breakdown while studying. However, he had met his first wife, Patricia Hale, prior to this, and she helped him recover, also encouraging him to start writing.
The two then got married in 1955, one year after he moved to London and two years after they graduated. However, Hale died in 1996, and Naipaul, who was knighted in 1989, went on to marry Lady Nadira.
Among his earliest books are: The Mystic Masseur (1957); The Suffrage of Elvira (1958); Miguel Street (1959); In a Free State (1971), which won Britain’s Booker Prize; Guerrillas (1975); A Bend in the River (1979); A Way in the World (1994); The Mimic Men (1967); and The Enigma of Arrival (1987).
Sir Naipaul’s nonfiction works include: An Area of Darkness (1965); India: A Wounded Civilization (1977); India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990); The Five Societies—British, French, and Dutch—in the West Indies (1963); and Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
Some of his most recent work were: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998); Half a Life (2001); The Writer and the World (2002) and Literary Occasions (2003); Magic Seeds (2004); and In The Masque of Africa (2010).
Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.