Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is an eminent Trinidad-born English writer, who also happens to share Indian heritage. He is famous for his early comic writings and later solemn and autobiographical works. He authored over thirty books, under both fiction and non-fiction genre, in his fifty years of journey as a writer.
Born on August 17, 1932, in a town of Chaguanas in Trinidad, he was the son of Brahmin parents; Droapatie and Seepersad Naipaul. His father was an English-language journalist who contributed short stories to the Trinidad Guardian. Naipul’s family relocated to the capital, Port of Spain, when he was seven. It was the encouragement and constant support of his father that he pursued a career in writing. However, before he could achieve success, his father passed away in 1953 leaving him a letter that later proved to be an impetus for his journey as a writer. He made his first attempt at novel writing at the age of 18 but faced difficulties finding a willing publisher.
Naipul received his education from an urban high performing school, Queen’s Royal College. Afterwards, he won Trinidad Government scholarship which allowed him to study abroad. Hence, he enrolled himself at the Oxford to study a degree course in English. Following his enrollment, Naipul felt being haunted by the idea that he was ill-adept at writing. He reacted impulsively and took a trip to Spain which he explained to his family as a nervous breakdown. His condition deteriorated and he even tried to commit suicide. His meeting with a college student, Patricia Ann Hale, helped him recover from his temporary mental illness. They tied the knot in 1955 and stayed married till Ann Hale’s death in 1996 from cancer. The same year he got married to a Pakistani journalist, Nadira Khannum Alvi.
Upon completion of his studies, Naipul started off his career as a freelance writer. Freelancing career left him with the feeling of rootlessness. However, he eventually found solace in retracing his Trinidadian background. During mid-1950s he worked as a broadcaster for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices. Later, he landed a job as a fiction reviewer at New Statesman in the late 1950’s. During this time he also published his debut work, The Mystic Masseur (1957). It is about a bright youth’s pursuit to become a writer and the concept was later adapted for big-screen. Around the time Massuer was published, Naipul began with another novel, The Suffrage of Elvira, with creative zeal.
A collection of linked stories set in Port of Spain, titled Miguel Street, was published in 1959. It was a farewell to Naipul’s homeland Trinidad. The narrator of the story is a young boy, who shares a few similarities with his creator, who goes to abroad to study as he earned some money. In early 1960s, Naipul published A House for Mr Biswas, which is considered a milestone in his writing career. The novel is a re-imagination of his father’s life as he witnessed in his childhood. The altered reduplication of his memories of his father affected Naipul so much so that he began to confuse the real and fictional version of his memories. It is a tragicomedy that explores the identity issues of a Brahmin Indian.
V. S. Naipul continued to write critically acclaimed works including The Middle Passage, An Area of Darkness, In a Free State and India: A Wounded Civilization. His works are now recognized at the international level and to honor his services and contributions he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
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