VS Naipaul, 85, ‘died peacefully after listening to Tennyson’
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, soon to be editor 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: “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 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.
Announcing his death on Saturday night, 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”.
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 said: “I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother.”
The author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, was knighted in 1990, and won numerous other major writing prizes. His 1961 novel A House For Mr Biswas is regarded by many critics as one of his most influential works.