Contentious Nobel-winning writer

LONDON — V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose lyrical writing and brittle personality made him one of the world’s most admired and contentious writers, died Saturday at his London home, his family said. He was 85.

His wife, Nadira Naipaul, said he was “a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavor.”

Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction reflected his personal journey from Trinidad to London and various stops in developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

In a career spanning half a century, Naipaul traveled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from his rural childhood to upper-class England, and he was hailed as one of the greatest

writers of the 20th century. Known for works including A Bend in the River, A House for Mr. Biswas, The Enigma of

Arrival and Finding the Centre,

Naipaul explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world.

Naipaul prided himself on his candor but drew criticism for his long history of offensive remarks. Among other comments, he called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and said Indian women wear a colored dot on their foreheads to say, “My head is empty.” He once laughed off the 1989 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei against Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy called Naipaul “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself.”