An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

V. S. Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul FRAS (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, and, familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.