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| Sir V. S. Naipaul TC | |
|---|---|
| Born | Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-08-17) 17 August 1932 (age 92) Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago |
| Occupation | Novelist, travel writer, essayist |
| Nationality | Trinidadian, British |
| Genre | Novel, Essay |
| Notable works | A House for Mr. Biswas A Bend in the River The Enigma of Arrival In a Free State |
| Notable awards | Booker Prize 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature 2001 |
| Spouse | Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul (1955 - 1996) Nadira Khannum Alvi Naipaul (1996 - present) |
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, commonly, V. S. Naipaul, (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; b. 17 August 1932) is a British writer born and raised in Trinidad to which his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. Naipaul is known for the wistfully comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker thematically expansive later novels of the wider world, and the vigilant chronicles of his travels and life, all written in his trademark, widely admired, prose style.
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.
Early life
V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia, was born on 17 August 1932 in the small town of Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago. He was the second child and first son born to mother Dropatie and father Seepersad Naipaul. A half-century earlier, his paternal grandfather had emigrated from India—from a village in the North-Western Provinces in the lower Gangetic Plain—to work as an indentured servant in the sugar plantations near Chaguanas. During that same time, their prospects ravaged by the Great Famine of 1876–1878, many Indians had emigrated to other outposts of the British Empire, such as Fiji, Guyana, and Suriname, where, although slavery had been abolished, slave labor was still in demand.
His father, Seepersad Naipaul, however, was able to carve out an unlikely career for himself. Without formal schooling, and by dint of effort, he became an English-language journalist in what was then still a largely illiterate land. By the time of his first son's birth, he was working as the provincial Chaguanas correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian. In the long essay, "A prologue to an autobiography," published as part of the collection Finding the centre (1981), Naipaul describes how Seepersad's elevation of writing as the noble profession, the English language its exceptional medium, and English literature its hallowed legacy, came to spawn the dreams and aspirations of his oldest son. Later, when Naipaul was seven, his family moved to Trinidad's capital Port of Spain, where his father began work at the Guardian 's headquarters. Here, after overcoming some of his provincial shyness, Naipaul began to excel at school. Some experiences from this period form the vivid opening chapter of his novel, A Way in the World.
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 (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)
Further reading
- Athill, Diana (2000) Stet. An Editor's Life (Grove Press)
- Schutte, Gillian (2010) Behind Sir Vidia’s Masque: The Night the Naipauls Came to Supper (Book Southern Africa).
- Girdharry, Arnold (2004) The Wounds of Naipaul and the Women in His Indian Trilogy (Copley).
- Barnouw, Dagmar (2003) Naipaul's Strangers (Indiana University Press).
- Dissanayake, Wimal (1993) Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul (P. Lang).
- French, Patrick (2008) The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (Random House)
- Hamner, Robert (1973). V.S. Naipaul (Twayne).
- Hammer, Robert ed. (1979) Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul (Heinemann).
- Hayward, Helen (2002) The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul: Sources and Contexts (Macmillan).
- Hughes, Peter (1988) V.S. Naipaul (Routledge).
- Jarvis, Kelvin (1989) V.S. Naipaul: A Selective Bibliography with Annotations, 1957–1987 (Scarecrow).
- Jussawalla, Feroza, ed. (1997) Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (University Press of Mississippi).
- Kelly, Richard (1989) V.S. Naipaul (Continuum).
- Khan, Akhtar Jamal (1998) V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Study (Creative Books)
- King, Bruce (1993) V.S. Naipaul (Macmillan).
- King, Bruce (2003) V.S. Naipaul, 2nd ed (Macmillan)
- Kramer, Jane (13 April 1980) From the Third World, an assessment of Naipaul's work in the New York Times Book Review.
- Levy, Judith (1995) V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography (Garland).
- Nightingale, Peggy (1987) Journey through Darkness: The Writing of V.S. Naipaul (University of Queensland Press).
- Said, Edward (1986) Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World (Salmagundi).
- Theroux, Paul (1998) Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin).
- Theroux, Paul (1972). V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (Deutsch).
- Weiss, Timothy F (1992) On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (University of Massachusetts Press).
References
- Cite error: The named reference
BBCdescentwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001". Nobelprize.org.
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
- V. S. Naipaul collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Template:Nndb
- Template:Dmoz
- Jonathan Rosen, Tarun Tejpal (Fall 1998). "V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154". The Paris Review.
- Editing Vidia, Diana Athill, Granta, a memoir of Naipaul by his editor
- A literary Brown Sahib
Categories:
- Use dmy dates from August 2011
- 1932 births
- Living people
- Alumni of University College, Oxford
- Booker Prize winners
- British Nobel laureates
- British novelists
- British people of Indo-Trinidadian descent
- British travel writers
- Critics of Islam
- David Cohen Prize recipients
- John Llewellyn Rhys Prize winners
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
- Honorary Fellows of University College, Oxford
- Knights Bachelor
- Nobel laureates in Literature
- Postcolonial literature
- Trinidad and Tobago emigrants to the United Kingdom
- Trinidad and Tobago Hindus
- Trinidad and Tobago journalists
- Trinidad and Tobago Nobel laureates
- Trinidad and Tobago novelists
- Trinidad and Tobago people of Indian descent
- Trinidad and Tobago writers
- Travel writers
- Wesleyan University faculty
- Jerusalem Prize recipients
- 20th-century British novelists
- 21st-century British novelists