V. S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul was born in rural Trinidad, the grandson of indentured servants from South Asia who came to work on Trinidad sugarcane plantations. His father was the journalist Seepersad Naipaul, on whom the character of Mr Biswas is based, and his mother came from the prominent Capildeo family, the model for the Tulsi family in A House for Mr Biswas. He moved from the countryside to Port of Spain at age six, attended Trinidad’s best-regarded secondary school, and then won a scholarship to Oxford, where he felt out-of-place and suffered a self-described “nervous breakdown.” Nevertheless, after graduating in 1953, the same year of his father’s death, Naipaul lived the rest of his life in England. He married his Oxford classmate Patricia Hale in 1955, while living in London and writing his first novel (The Mystic Masseur) and book of short stories (Miguel Street). However, he found literary fame only after the 1961 publication of A House for Mr Biswas and began writing nonfiction soon thereafter, publishing travelogues of the Caribbean (The Middle Passage) and India (An Area of Darkness) before returning to London, famous but penniless. He would later take extended trips to East Africa, Argentina (where he began a decades-long affair with Margaret Gooding), and Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan (where, in 1996, as his first wife Patricia Hale lay dying of cancer in a London hospital, he resolved to leave his mistress Gooding and marry a journalist he had just met, Nadira Alvi). He lived out his later life in a cottage in the English countryside and ultimately published more than a dozen novels and as many books of nonfiction. He was knighted in 1990, and the Swedish Academy awarded him the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” Despite his international acclaim, Naipaul often faced scathing criticism for his pessimism, treatment of women, and especially his nonfiction’s critical view of non-European peoples and countries (including Trinidad).