Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, T.C. (born August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British novelist of Hindu heritage and Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity. Naipaul lives in Wiltshire, England. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and was also knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He is married to Lady Nadira. A scion of the politically powerful Capildeo family, Sir Vidia is the son, older brother and uncle of published authors (Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul and Neil Bissoondath respectively).

In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern philosophe, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish-born British author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: "Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."
 

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in a small town in 1932 in Chaguanas, close to the Port of Spain on Trinidad into a family of Indian Brahmin origin. His father, Seoprasad Naipaul, was a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian. He also published short stories. When Naipaul was six the family moved to Port of Spain, the capital. Seoprasad Naipaul died of a heart attack in 1953 without witnessing the success of his son as a writer. He had encouraged Naipaul in his writing aspirations, telling him in a letter: "Don't be scared of being an artist. D. H. Lawrence was an artist through and through; and, for the time being at any rate, you should think as Lawrence. Remember what he used to say, 'Art for my sake.'" At the age of 18 he had written his first novel which was rejected by the publisher.
 

At the age of 18 Naipaul travelled to England where, after studying at University College at Oxford, he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1953. From then on he continued to live in England (since the 70s in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge) but he has also spent a great deal of time travelling in Asia, Africa and America. Apart from a few years in the middle of the 1950s, when he was employed by the BBC as a free-lance journalist, he has devoted himself entirely to his writing.

Naipaul's works consist mainly of novels and short stories, but also include some that are documentary. He is to a very high degree a cosmopolitan writer, a fact that he himself considers to stem from his lack of roots: he is unhappy about the cultural and spiritual poverty of Trinidad, he feels alienated from India, and in England he is incapable of relating to and identifying with the traditional values of what was once a colonial power.

The events in his earliest books take place in the West Indies. A few years after the publication of his first work, The Mystic Masseur (1957), came what is considered by many to be one of his most outstanding novels, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), in which the protagonist is modelled on the author's father.

After the enormous success of A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul extended the geographical and social perspective of his writing to describe with increasing pessimism the deleterious impact of colonialism and emerging nationalism on the third world, in for instance Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), the latter a portrayal of Africa that has been compared to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In his travel books and his documentary works he presents his impressions of the country of his ancestors, India, as in India : A Million Mutinies Now (1990), and also critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arab countries such as Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan in Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998).

The novels The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are to a great extent autobiographical. In The Enigma of Arrival he describes how a landed estate in southern England and its proprietor, with a colonial background and afflicted by a degenerative disease, gradually decline before finally perishing. A Way in the World, which is a cross between fiction, memoirs and history, consists of nine independent but thematically linked narratives in which Caribbean and Indian traditions are blended with the culture encountered by the author when he moved to England at the age of 18.

V.S. Naipaul has been awarded a number of literary prizes, among them the Booker Prize in 1971 and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1986. He is an honorary doctor of St. Andrew's College and Columbia University and of the Universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford. In 1990 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.