VS Naipaul dies after reading Tennyson poem
● Nobel prize winner passes away at London home at age of 85
Nobel Prize winner Sir VS Naipaul died peacefully after reading a poem by Lord Tennyson, his friend Geordie Greig has said.
The editor of the Mail On Sunday, who will soon take over editorship of the Daily Mail, had been friends with the British author for 20 years and was with him at his bedside as he died at the age of 85.
Greig told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend that he rushed to be with the writer after a call from his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul.
He said: “It was very moving. I got a call from Nadira to come round and it literally was at his deathbed.
“Nadira talked about a poem by Lord Tennyson, Crossing The Bar, which had great resonance and meaning to him and I just turned on my phone and found it and we read it.”
He added: “He drifted off and
0 The famously outspoken Sir VS Naipaul penned more than 30 books over his lifetime
it was peaceful and very, very sad but what a life, what an achievement, what a legacy.”
The writer, who penned more than 30 books over his lifetime, died at his London home, his family said.
Announcing his death, Lady Naipaul said he had lived a life “full of wonderful creativity and endeavour”.
Naipaul was famously outspoken throughout his career, and notoriously fell out with
author Paul Theroux, whom he had mentored.
But the pair later reunited, and Theroux spoke fondly of Naipaul as he paid tribute to “one of the greatest writers of our time”.
He said: “He never wrote falsely. He was a scourge of anyone who used a cliche or an un-thought out sentence. He was very scrupulous about his writing, very severe, too.”
Greig added that Theroux visited the writer shortly before he died.
Naipaul, whose books often dealt with colonialism and attacked religion, politicians and pillars of the literary establishment, also had a tense relationship with author Salman Rushdie, once describing Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa on Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism”.
In a Twitter post, Rushdie conceded that the pair had “disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature”, but added: “I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia.”
Lady Naipaul said her husband was “a giant in all that he achieved”.
She added: “He died peacefully surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”
The author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.