By Harrison Smith in Washington Post
August 13, 2018
V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel Prize-winning writer from Trinidad who penned comic masterpieces of island life before turning to the larger world, traveling from South America to Africa and Asia for richly detailed works on postcolonial states, died Aug. 11 at his home in London. He was 85.
His family announced the death in a statement. The cause was not immediately known.
In the second half of the 20th century, few writers were as praised — or scorned — as Mr. Naipaul, a prose stylist with talent as great as his penchant for controversy. “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility,” Mr. Naipaul once said, “he is dead.”
Sir Vidia, as he was sometimes known after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990, faced accusations of racism, sexism, chauvinism and Islamophobia. He had long-running literary spats with Paul Theroux, a former protege who lambasted Mr. Naipaul as “a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone,” and the poet Derek Walcott, a Caribbean peer who depicted Mr. Naipaul in a poem as “a rodent in old age.”
Source Article in Washington Post.
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