NAIPAUL, V.S.

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”

 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad of Indian descent, read English at Oxford and worked for a short time as a writer for the BBC.  His first novel, The Mystic Masseur , a comic portrait of Trinidadian society, was published in 1957 to critical acclaim, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize the following year.  He continued with humorous tales of Trinidad in Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr Biswas  (1961) and both were well received.  His first novel to be set in England, Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion won the Hawthornden Prize in 1964.    His subsequent novels veer away from the comic and tend to a bleaker outlook, and he developed more political themes and began to write about colonial and post-colonial societies in the process of decolonization. One of his great Post Colonial works, In a Free State was awarded the Booker Prize in 1971.

 In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”

We regularly stock first editions of Naipaul's work, please scroll down to view current stock.