Trinidad born, VS Naipaul, is a British writer of Indian origin, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and the Booker prize in 1971.  His early novels were all set in his country of birth, and he later expanded the scope of his novels which he set in the wider world. He studied at Oxford and has published more than thirty books, both fiction and nonfiction over a period of about fifty years. The nobel laureate is often also heralded as Joseph Conrad’s heir by critics.

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Naipaul wrote a highly acclaimed and popular trilogy of nonfiction books on India – An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). It has been alleged that his writing is a largely piercing and unjust portrayal of Indian society. His most famous book remains, A House for Mr Biswas, which the Time magazine included in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005

He was married to Patricia Ann Halem from 1955 until her death in 1996, who was his first reader and critic.  He later married Nadira Naipaul in the same year.

Latest book: The Masque of Africa, released in 2010 is Naipaul’s 16th nonfiction book. The descriptions of West African forests and the fetishes that are still worshipped in them are some of the best in a book which basically identifies performance as a major aspect of most African religions.

Joan Didian, of New York Review of Books had this to say about the writer, “The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour. This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact.”

Quirky fact: JRR Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, judged Naipaul's Anglo-Saxon paper and declared it to be the best in the university.