V S Naipaul, who has died aged 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author's personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist. The writer, who won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and the Nobel prize for literature 30 years later, has delighted and beguiled readers with works such as The Mystic Masseur (1957), A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979). Drawing on his own life of deracination - a man of Indian family born in Trinidad who studied at Oxford and worked for the BBC before starting to write fiction - Naipaul made picaresque novels that glint with precisely cut sentences and are shaped into a thrillingly original architecture. His formal invention earned him a place as one of the very greatest writers of the past century. He was in the vanguard of a generation of Commonwealth writers who utterly reshaped the meaning of "English literature".
The Guardian view on VS Naipaul: a complicated man and a complicated legacy | Editorial | Opinion | The Guardian
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