A Trinidad childhood fed a Booker-winning global eye
V. S. Naipaul, born in 1932 in a Trinidad sugar town to a family of indentured Indian migrants, became a British writer of more than thirty books. Comic island novels gave way to A House for Mr Biswas, a 1971 Booker for In a Free State, and the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Both of Naipaul's grandfathers left British India in the late 19th century as indentured sugar workers, part of a wave of emigrants whose prospects the Great Famine of 1876 to 1878 had wrecked, heading for colonies from Fiji to Suriname that still wanted cheap labour after slavery's abolition. The family counted itself Brahmin, but in Trinidad old rules loosened: chicken and fish reached the table, Christmas dinner was celebrated, saris gave way to Western dress, and the children were encouraged to speak only English. His father Seepersad, a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian, revered writers and planted his son's ambition.
The family moved to Port of Spain when he was seven and settled there at nine. At Queen's Royal College, run like a British public school, he won a government scholarship before turning 17 and chose English at Oxford, flying out in August 1950 with a pad and copying pencil bought because he was going to become a writer; those notes later fed a chapter of The Enigma of Arrival, written 37 years on.
Oxford brought loneliness and depression. In 1952 he spent all his savings on an impulsive trip to Spain, later calling it something like a mental illness. Patricia Ann Hale, a history student he met at a college play, helped him recover and began planning his career. Both graduated with seconds in 1953, though Tolkien rated his Anglo-Saxon paper the best in the university. That October his father died, and his eight-year-old brother Shiva performed the cremation rites Naipaul could not afford to travel home for. After failing a postgraduate degree, he said he hated Oxford.
Honours eventually piled up: the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, Trinidad's Trinity Cross and a knighthood in 1990. His prose drew wide praise, while his opinions often provoked controversy. He died in August 2018.
Source: V. S. Naipaul
