Divisive writer VS Naipaul wins literature Nobel

HT’s report on Trinidad-born author winning the top honour and the debate that followed

- HT Correspondent and Agencies

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on October 11 won an award that he had often said he would not win: the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish academy which chooses the winners, phoned Naipaul to tell him the news. “He was very surprised and I don’t think he was pretending,” Engdahi said.

Naipaul, 69, has always maintained that the Swedish academy prefers politically correct writers and argued that his pro-Western views and criticism of the third world rendered him unacceptable.

Naipaul has had a love-hate relationship with India, the country from which his ancestors emigrated to Trinidad. Two early books ‘An Area of Darkness in the 1960s and A Wounded Civilization - in the 1970s were bitterly critical. But the more recent India: A Million Mutinies Now is far kinder.