Nobel prize laureate VS Naipaul died on Saturday at the age of 85 in London, his family said. The British author “died surrounded by those he loved, having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour”, his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a statement.
Lady Naipaul said VS Naipaul, who was knighted by the British government in 1990, was a “giant in all he achieved”.
Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trindad to an Indian civil servant. He studied at Oxford on a scholarship, wrote more than 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Some of his famous works are A Bend in the River, India: A Wounded Civilization and A House for Mr Biswas – which was based on his father.
“His death leaves a gaping hole in Britain’s literary heritage, but there is no doubt that his books live on,” Geordie Greig, the editor of The Mail on Sunday, told the BBC.
Fans as well as other authors paid their tributes to Naipaul on Twitter.
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