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Sir V.S. Naipaul – Bio-bibliography
English
Biobibliographical notes
The Trinidadian English writer V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul was born in
1932 in Chaguanas, close to the Port of Spain on Trinidad, in a family
descended from Hindu immigrants from the north of India. His grandfather worked
in a sugar cane plantation and his father was a journalist and writer. At the
age of 18 Naipaul travelled to England where, after studying at University
College at Oxford, he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1953. From
then on he continued to live in England (since the 70s in Wiltshire, close to
Stonehenge) but he has also spent a great deal of time travelling in Asia,
Africa and America. Apart from a few years in the middle of the 1950s, when he
was employed by the BBC as a free-lance journalist, he has devoted himself
entirely to his writing.
Naipaul's works consist mainly of novels and short stories, but also include
some that are documentary. He is to a very high degree a cosmopolitan writer, a
fact that he himself considers to stem from his lack of roots: he is unhappy
about the cultural and spiritual poverty of Trinidad, he feels alienated from
India, and in England he is incapable of relating to and identifying with the
traditional values of what was once a colonial power.
The events in his earliest books take place in the West Indies. A few years
after the publication of his first work, The Mystic Masseur (1957), came what
is considered by many to be one of his most outstanding novels, A House for Mr.
Biswas (1961), in which the protagonist is modelled on the author's father.
After the enormous success of A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul extended the
geographical and social perspective of his writing to describe with increasing
pessimism the deleterious impact of colonialism and emerging nationalism on the
third world, in for instance Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979),
the latter a portrayal of Africa that has been compared to Conrad's Heart of
Darkness.
In his travel books and his documentary works he presents his impressions of
the country of his ancestors, India, as in India : A Million Mutinies Now
(1990), and also critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arab
countries such as Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan in Among the Believers
(1981) and Beyond Belief (1998).
The novels The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are to a
great extent autobiographical. In The Enigma of Arrival he describes how a
landed estate in southern England and its proprietor, with a colonial
background and afflicted by a degenerative disease, gradually decline before
finally perishing. A Way in the World, which is a cross between fiction,
memoirs and history, consists of nine independent but thematically linked
narratives in which Caribbean and Indian traditions are blended with the
culture encountered by the author when he moved to England at the age of 18.
V.S. Naipaul has been awarded a number of literary prizes, among them the
Booker Prize in 1971 and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1986. He
is an honorary doctor of St. Andrew's College and Columbia University and of
the Universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford. In 1990 he was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth.
A selection of works by V.S. Naipaul:
The Mystic Masseur. London: Deutsch, 1957.
Miguel Street. London: Deutsch, 1959.
A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Deutsch, 1961.
The Middle Passage : Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch
in the West Indies and South America. London: Deutsch, 1962.
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. London: Deutsch, 1963.
A Flag on the Island. London: Deutsch, 1967.
The Loss of El Dorado : A History. London: Deutsch, 1969.
In a Free State. London: Deutsch, 1971.
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. London: Deutsch, 1972.
Guerrillas. London: Deutsch, 1975.
India : A Wounded Civilization. London: Deutsch, 1977.
A Bend in the River. London: Deutsch, 1979.
A Congo Diary. Los Angeles, CA: Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980.
Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey. London: Deutsch, 1981.
The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking, 1987.
India : A Million Mutinies Now. London: Heinemann, 1990.
A Way in the World. London: Heinemann, 1994.
Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. London: Little,
Brown, 1998.
Reading and Writing : A Personal Account. New York: New York Review of Books,
2000.
Half a life. London: Picador, 2001.
Literature:
Theroux, Paul, V.S. Naipaul : an introduction to his work. London: Deutsch,
1972.
Hamner, Robert, V.S. Naipaul. New York: Twayne, 1973.
Critical perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Ed. Robert D. Hamner. London: Heinemann,
1979.
Nightingale, Peggy, Journey through darkness : the writing of V.S. Naipaul. St.
Lucia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1987.
Hughes, Peter, V.S. Naipaul. London: Routledge, 1988.
Jarvis, Kelvin, V.S. Naipaul : a selective bibliography with annotations, 1957–
1987. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow, 1989.
Kelly, Richard, V.S. Naipaul. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Weiss, Timothy F., On the margins : the art of exile in V.S. Naipaul. Amherst:
Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Dissanayake, Wimal, Self and colonial desire : travel writings of V.S. Naipaul.
New York: P. Lang, 1993.
King, Bruce, V.S. Naipaul. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.
Levy, Judith, V.S. Naipaul : displacement and autobiography. New York: Garland,
1995.
Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. Ed. Feroza Jussawalla. Jackson: Univ. Press of
Mississippi, 1997.
Khan, Akhtar Jamal, V.S. Naipaul : a critical study. New Delhi: Creative Books,
1998.
Theroux, Paul, Sir Vidia's shadow : a friendship across five continents.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
The Swedish Academy
