Naipaul, V.S.

V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul, a West Indian author of Indian descent, born in Chaguanas near Port of Spain on Trinidad in a family of Hindu immigrants. His paternal grandfather was a plantation worker; his father was a journalist and author. At the age of eighteen, Naipaul travelled to England to study at University College, Oxford. He was based near Stonehenge in Wiltshire since the 1970s and traveled extensively in Asia, Africa and the United States. He became a prolific full-time writer since leaving his job as a broadcaster at the BBC, where he worked for a short period in the 1950s. He was for many years mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, and in 2001, the Nobel Prize centenary year, it was finally his turn. Naipaul was knighted in 1990.