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Author's popularity: 3
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Popularity: 2
Vote: | Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. |
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Biography
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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, T.C. (born August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British novelist of Hindu heritage and Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity. Naipaul lives in Wiltshire, England. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and was also knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He is married to Lady Nadira. A scion of the politically powerful Capildeo family, Sir Vidia is the son, older brother and uncle of published authors (Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul and Neil Bissoondath respectively).
Both his fiction and his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the third world. Most notably, Edward Said has argued that he "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies" (p. 53). His supporters argue that he is actually an advocate for a more realistic development of the Third World, that he is motivated by a passionate desire for the improvement of the countries which he writes about, and that it is actually the assumptions of the likes of Said which hold them back. Naipaul's contempt for many aspects of liberal orthodoxy is uncompromising. His works have become required reading in some schools within the third world. His later works are also considerably less harsh than his earlier ones.
Naipaul's prominent support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a "creative passion", and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a "mortal wound". He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. William Dalrymple has argued that this is too simplistic, and that both Vijayanagar and the Mughal empire were hybrid civilisations, combining elements of both cultures.
Awards * Booker Prize - 1971
* Nobel Prize for Literature - 2001
1977 Declined to be Commander of the order of the British Empire
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "V. S. Naipaul".
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