British author V.S. Naipaul who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, famous for his ‘post-colonial change’ writing, has died in London at the age of 85.
Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and the son of an Indian civil servant, was best known for his masterpiece “A House for Mr Biswas” and his Man Booker Prize-winning “In A Free State”.
Born into an Indo-Trinidadian family in Trinidad and Tobago in 1932, the author published more than 30 works spanning both fiction and nonfiction in a career spanning 50 years.
In a statement, his wife Nadira Naipaul called him a “giant in all that he achieved” and said he had died surrounded by “those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavor”, a report said.
Critics accused him of holding people of the developing world in contempt even as his diamantine prose won him a series of awards including the Booker prize in 1971, a knighthood in 1989 and the Nobel prize for literature in 2001.
The Swedish Academy described him as a “literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice” When after he was awarded the 2001 Nobel prize for literature.
Having dreamed of a literary career since the age of 10, he hoped to “find out his material and miraculously become a writer” while studying for his “worthless degree”, but instead found only “solitude and despair”, as he told the Paris Review in 1998.
“I was far too well prepared for it. I was far more intelligent than most of the people in my college or in my course”, said the British Author.
Geordie Greig, editor of the Mail on Sunday and a close friend, said his death leaves a “gaping hole in Britain’s literary heritage”, but there is “no doubt” that his “books live on”.
> Shatabdi Sarker Poushi
