Naipaul, long tipped for the prestigious award, won the one million dollars prize for combining existing genres into a style of his own in works that compel readers “to see the presence of suppressed histories”, the Swedish Academy said in its citation.
Naipaul, considered the leading novelist to emerge from the English-speaking Caribbean, is a master of English prose style who is known for his studies of alienation — an individual’s sense of being on the outside of society.
His works range from short stories, through the novel, to travel writing.
His earliest books take place in the West Indies. In his first major success, “A House for Mr Biswas”, published in 1961, he sets events in Trinidad, describing a society on the edge of the declining British Empire from the perspective of a man modelled on his father.
In later writing he has described the impact of colonialism and nationalism on the third world.
Naipaul’s views on religion have raised some eyebrows.
“If you follow the whole oeuvre of Naipaul, he is very critical of all religions,” Academy board member Per Wastberg said.
“He considers religion as the scourge of humanity, which dampens down our fantasies and our lust to think and experiment.”
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932, near Port of Spain in Trinidad, in a family descended from Hindu immigrants from northern India. His father was a journalist and writer.
He went to England at the age of 18 to study at Oxford University on a scholarship, and has lived in England since then, devoting himself to writing.
His work revolves around the ambivalence of exile, something he experienced at first hand as an Indian in the West Indies, and later as a West Indian in England.
He is a nomadic intellectual in a post-colonial world and in moral terms is a successor to Joseph Conrad as a chronicler of how imperialism changes people.
In the mid-1950s Naipaul was a broadcaster for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices and later a regular fiction reviewer for the New Statesman.
Naipaul’s first book “Miguel Street” (1959), was a series of farewell sketches to Port of Spain, Trinidad, but his breakthrough came with “A House for Mr Biswas” which appeared in 1961.
Hailed as a masterpiece, it tells a tragicomic story of the search for independence and identity of a Brahmin Indian living in Trinidad. Much of it is inspired by the experiences of the author’s father.
Naipaul later received a grant from the Trinidad government to travel in the Caribbean and travelled widely in the 1960s and early 1970s in India, South America, Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and the United States.
Naipaul has lived in Britain since 1950 although he travels extensively. His essays and other writing are often troubled explorations of West Indian and other societies.—dpa / Reuters