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Sir V.S. Naipaul (b.1945)
Sir V.S. Naipaul, who has critiqued the ideals of everything from Islam to postcolonial life, won the Nobel Prize in literature recently.
Best known for the novels "A Bend in the River" and "A House for Mr Biswas," Naipaul was born in Trinidad and moved to England to study at Oxford. He used the West Indian island as his first subject and then extended his writings to include India, Africa, North America and the Islamic communities of Asia.
The academy cited Naipaul for his "incorruptible scrutiny" of postcolonial society and his critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism.
Naipaul has the reputation for being a tough-minded, misanthropic man with no use for such literary rituals as publishing parties and flattering blurbs for his peers. In "Sir Vidia's Shadow" , former friend Paul Theroux wrote that "he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament."
