Author who won Nobel Prize for often bleak depictions of post-colonial trauma

Sir V S Naipaul, who has died aged 85, was often cited as the greatest living writer in the English language and won almost every possible literary prize including, in 2001, the Nobel.

A Trinidadian Indian, he had lived in England since he first came to the country to study at Oxford University in 1950.

He will probably be best remembered for his fourth (and most autobiographical) novel, A House for Mr Biswas, with its Trinidadian setting and its themes, typical of all his work: self-determination, exile, identity and the gradual disintegration of a post-colonial society.

He was born

Vidiadhar

Surajprasad

Naipaul at

Chaguanas in

Trinidad and

Tobago in 1932, the grandson of a Brahmin who came to Trinidad from India. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, whom he adored, was a frustrated journalist whose disappointment with life eventually led to a nervous breakdown.

Along with five sisters, Vidia, as he was known, had one brother, Shiva, who was 12 years younger. He also became a well-known novelist but died in 1985 at the age of 40. Though they were not close, Naipaul having left Trinidad when his brother was 5, he often said this bereavement marked his emotional life permanently.

Born a committed atheist but growing up in a devout and closely knit Hindu family, Naipaul found his home life anachronistic and embarrassing. He attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain and, filled with distaste for the squalor and inertia which surrounded him, dreamed of escaping, and turned to writing for solace.

He left Trinidad on a scholarship to read English at University College, Oxford, but was unhappy and lonely there. Eventually graduating, he moved to a bedsit in London, and began freelancing for the BBC Caribbean Service while writing his first novel.

At Oxford he met Patricia Ann Hale, and in 1955 they wed, though his personal aversion to ‘‘titillation’’ and ‘‘trivia’’ meant that, though much of his work was autobiographical, his wife never merited a mention. In 1957, he began reviewing books for the New Statesman magazine, where he gained a reputation for being the most brutal of critics.

Naipaul’s first published novel, The Mystic Masseur, appeared in 1957 and gained immediate acclaim, winning him the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Drawing much inspiration from the work of the Indian writer R K Narayan, the novel featured a humble schoolteacher who, quite accidentally, becomes a mystic guru. This tale of the ‘‘little man’’ who struggles against life, and whose successes and failures seem almost unrelated to his efforts, became characteristic of much of Naipaul’s work.

Though it contained a critique of the unstable roots of political power in Trinidad, it was considered a comic novel and was soon followed by The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959), which won the Somerset Maugham Award. Both novels still featured the quaint and idiosyncratic characters who populate a small area of Trinidad and, though critically successful, they did not achieve popular success.

This situation was eventually altered for good with the publication of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), far and away his most successful novel. In it he told the tale of Mohun Biswas, a small-time Trinidadian Asian who is, in large part, a description of Naipaul’s own father. From his unlucky birth (with six fingers) to his unlamented death, all Mr Biswas desires is a home in which to feel secure. In a caricature style reminiscent of both Narayan and Dickens (one of Naipaul’s favourite authors), Mr Biswas eventually overcomes life’s obstacles, only to experience a pyrrhic victory. Though extremely successful in England, the novel was unpopular with other Caribbean writers, who considered it patronising and colonial.

In September 1960 he returned to the West Indies on a travel scholarship from the government of Trinidad and Tobago, whose prime minister had suggested the writing of The Middle Passage (1962), which became the first of his many travel books and which described his impressions of five different local societies. His conclusions were scathing, including the sentence ‘‘the West Indies are Hell’’, and the book, and much of his later travel writing, though critically appreciated, were often condemned as reactionary, misanthropic and misogynistic.

By 1962 Naipaul was famous and was often asked to appear on TV interviews, during one of which he stormed off set, declaring the interviewer underprepared. ‘‘Things matter only when they are done well,’’ he said. Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963) was his first novel to be set outside the West Indies and dealt with the humdrum, suburban life of a minor civil servant in London.

An Area of Darkness (1964) became an account of the journey he made across India and towards his roots. In a remorselessly depressing work he included long descriptions of the subcontinent’s grotesque poverty and thereby caused considerable controversy. In his by now habitual rebarbative manner he greeted all such criticism with contempt for ‘‘First World types who find drastic poverty enchanting’’.

From the late 1960s his novels grew more political and darker still, dealing with totalitarian oppression and systematic despair. The Mimic Men (1967) is narrated by a deposed Indian politician who lives on an imaginary Caribbean island whose culture Naipaul describes as a mere ‘‘mimicry’’ of others.

By 1970 he was a relatively wealthy man and bought a cottage in Wiltshire, to which he moved with his wife. For many years he had a mistress, Margaret Gooding, with whom he claimed to have found real sexual passion.

Less comic and substantially bleaker in outlook, his next major work, In a Free State (1971), won that year’s Booker Prize with its two stories about racism in the West and one novella about even worse racism in the developing world.

For most of the 1980s Naipaul wrote no fiction. He was notorious for replying to dinner invitations with strict instructions as to his dietary requirements and, more often than not, specifically requesting the wine which was to accompany the meal.

His other interests included cricket and callisthenics, and in 1987 he published his most successful book for a decade, The Enigma of Arrival, which painted an evocative picture of his rural life and drew subtle links between this and the patterns of Caribbean and Indian culture. In 1990 he was knighted, and received Trinidad’s highest literary medal, the Trinity Cross. This was significant since his relationship with his former home had always been ambivalent.

In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the citation noting ‘‘he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony’’. VS Naipaul’s first wife died in 1996, and soon after he married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. She survives him. – Telegraph Group

From the late 1960s his novels grew more political and darker still, dealing with totalitarian oppression and systematic despair.