Sir
Naipaul was born into an Indian family in
Trinidad. At the age of 18 he wrote his first
novel which was rejected by the publisher, his
father Seepersad Naipaul encouraged him in
writing. Naipual studied at Queen's Royal
College, Port of Spain, and in 1950 he won a
scholarship to Oxford.
He
met Patricia Hale at Oxford and they married in
1955, she died in 1966 and Naipual then married
Nadira Alvi, a divorced Pakistani
journalist. On graduation Naipaul started his
career as a freelance writer. During this period
Naipaul felt himself rootless, but found his
voice as a writer in the mid-1950s, when he
started to examine his own Trinidadian
background. From 1954 to 1956 Naipaul was a
broadcaster for the BBC's Caribbean Voices, and
between the years 1957 and 1961 he was a regular
fiction reviewer for the.
Since
1950 Naipaul has lived in Britain, but traveled
extensively. His essays and travel writings are
often negative, unsentimental explorations of
West Indian society as in THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
(1962). In 1961 appeared A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS,
often regarded as his masterpiece, which tells
the tragicomic story of the search for
independence and identity of a Brahmin Indian
living in Trinidad.
Selected
works/ non-fiction:
- BEYOND BELIEF
(1998)
- THE MIDDLE
PASSAGE (1962)
- AND AREA OF
DARKNESS (1964)
- THE
OVERCROWDED BARRACOON AND OTHER ARTICLES
(1972)
- INDIA: A
WOUNDED CIVILIZATION (1977)
- A CONGO DIARY
(1980)
- THE RETURN OF
EVA PERÓN (1980)
- AMONG THE
BELIEVERS: AN ISLAMIC JOURNEY (1981) - Matka
islamin maailmaan
- FINDING THE
CENTRE (1984)
- A TURN IN THE
SOUTH (1989)
- INDIA: A
MILLION MUTINIES NOW (1990)
- HOMELESS BY
CHOICE (1992, with R. Jhabvala and S.
Rushdie)
- BOMBAY (1994,
with Raghubir Singh) BEYOND BELIEF (1998)
- BETWEEN FATHER
AND SON: Family Letters, edited by Gillon
Aitken (1999)
fiction:
- HALF A LIFE
(2001)
- THE MYSTIC
MASSEUR (1957)
- THE SUFFRAGE
OF ELVIRA (1958)
- MIGUEL STREET
(1959)
- A HOUSE FOR MR
BISWAS (1961)
- MR STONE AND
THE KNIGHT'S COMPANION (1963)
- A FLAG ON THE
ISLAND (1967)
- THE MIMIC MEN
(1967)
- THE LOSS OF
ELDORADO (1969)
- IN A FREE
STATE (1971)
- GUERILLAS
(1975)
- A BEND IN THE
RIVER (1979)
- FINDING THE
CENTRE (1984)
- THE ENIGMA OF
ARRIVAL (1987)
- A WAY IN THE
WORLD (1994)
- HALF A LIFE,
2001
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