The Nobel laureate VS Naipaul passed away at his home in London, aged 85. The British novelist VS Naipaul was most famous for his seminal 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas.
Naipaul was awarded 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”.
Other honours awarded to him throughout his life included the Booker Prize in 1971, the David Cohen Literature Prize in 1993 and a knighthood in 1990.
Among his other well-known works were those on Islamic fundamentalism – the 1981 work Among The Believers and the 1998 book Beyond Belief.
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Although his writing was widely praised for its compassion toward the destitute and the displaced, Naipaul himself offended many with his arrogant behavior and jokes about former subjects of empire.
In an extraordinary career spanning half a century, the writer traveled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from rural Trinidad to upper class England, picked up the most coveted literary awards and a knighthood, and was hailed as one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century.
