V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, a sugar town in Trinidad, into a family descended from Hindu migrants who had come from India as indentured labourers. His father, Seepersad, was a journalist with literary ambitions of his own, and his reverence for the writing life shaped his son’s resolve. A government scholarship took Naipaul to University College, Oxford, in 1950. Afterward he settled in England, finding early work presenting the BBC programme Caribbean Voices.

His first books, including Miguel Street, were comic portraits of Port of Spain. A House for Mr Biswas (1961), modelled on his father’s struggle for independence and a home of his own, widened that comedy into something more grave. From the 1960s he alternated fiction with travel and reportage, beginning with An Area of Darkness, about India. In a Free State won the Booker Prize in 1971; A Bend in the River charted an African nation after independence. The Enigma of Arrival turned inward, considering a writer’s years in rural Wiltshire. Across these books he returned to rootlessness, mimicry and the disorder left by empire, in prose of great precision.

Naipaul was knighted in 1990. His views on religion, the postcolonial world and other writers often provoked controversy, and critics such as Edward Said and Derek Walcott took issue with him. He published more than thirty books over half a century and died in London in 2018.