Nobel prize for literature goes to V.S. Naipaul

12.30 pm

The Trinidad-born British author V.S. Naipaul has won the last major literary honour to have eluded him - the £650,000 ($2.27m) Nobel prize.

The Swedish academy that presides over the world's most famous literary gong said Sir Vidia was chosen for his "incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".

But the choice may be seen as inflammatory in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US given Sir Vidia's condemnation of Muslim fundamentalism.

Horace Engdahl, head of the academy, pre-empted criticism of the decision, saying that Sir Vidia's travel books showed he had a more subtle view of Islam than it sometimes appeared.

"I don't think we will have violent protests ... What he's attacking in Islam is a trait that it has in common with all cultures that conquerors bring along, that it tends to obliterate the preceding culture."

Sir Vidia, 69, has produced two-dozen books inspired by the themes of displacement and migrancy in a post-colonial world, including A House for Mr Biswas and the recently published Half a Novel, his first book in seven years.

"I am utterly delighted, this is an unexpected accolade," he said on hearing the news. "It is a great tribute to both England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors, and to the dedication and support of my agent, Gillon Aitken."

Mr Engdahl said it had taken several attempts by Sir Vidia's wife, Nadira, to get him to take the telephone call. "He was very surprised ... because he feels that as a writer he doesn't represent anything but himself."

The academy singled out for particular praise his 1987 work, The Enigma of Arrival, an elegiac novel set partly in Wiltshire and dominated by death. In it, Sir Vidia had created an "unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighbourhoods," the members said.

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 but has lived in Britain since 1950 when he arrived to take up a government scholarship at Oxford University. He later criticised the lack of intellectual rigour at Oxford although his tutor dismissed the jibe as pique at only getting a second-class degree.

His career as a writer has marked him out as a creator of memorable prose, but his work has often been overshadowed by politically incorrect opinions and vendettas.

He attacked Tony Blair and his government as intellectual barbarians and dismissed other writers of the post-colonial world - notably Salman Rushdie - saying he had no time to read them. He infuriated the gay community by claiming that the novelist E.M Forster and the economist John Maynard Keynes used their influential positions to procure gay sex. And he fell out so badly with Paul Theroux, a one-time friend, that Theroux wrote a book entitled Sir Vidia's Shadow in which the older man was portrayed as snobbish and rude.

Sir Vidia, who has previously won the Booker and was knighted in 1990, becomes the 98th recipient of the Nobel prize.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who founded the prizes, said the award should go to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" and "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

- INDEPENDENT