V. S. Naipaul

Sir V. S. Naipaul TC
VS Naipaul in Dhaka in 2016
Born	Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-08-17) 17 August 1932 (age 84) Chaguanas, Caroni County, Trinidad and Tobago
Occupation	Novelist, travel writer, essayist
Citizenship	British, born in Trinidad.
Period	1957–2010
Genre	Novel, essay
Notable works	A House for Mr Biswas In a Free State A Bend in the River The Enigma of Arrival
Notable awards	Booker Prize 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature 2001
Spouse	Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul (1955–96, her death) Nadira Khannum Alvi Naipaul (1996–present)

Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul (1955–96, her death)

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; born 17 August 1932), is a Nobel Prize-winning British writer who was born in Trinidad. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. He has published more than thirty books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some fifty years.

"Where there had been swamp at the foot of the Northern Range, with mud huts with earthen walls that showed the damp halfway up ... there was now the landscape of Holland.... Sugarcane as a crop had ceased to be important. None of the Indian villages were like villages I had known. No narrow roads; no dark, overhanging trees; no huts; no earth yards with hibiscus hedges; no ceremonial lighting of lamps, no play of shadows on the wall; no cooking of food in half-walled verandas, no leaping firelight; no flowers along gutters or ditches where frogs croaked the night away. "

V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas in Trinidad. He was the second child of his mother Droapatie (née Capildeo) and father Seepersad Naipaul. In the 1880s, his grandparents emigrated from India to work as farm labourers. In the Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became an English-language journalist, and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian. In 1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent. In "A prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer.