Since Alfred Nobel earmarked his literature prize for outstanding work "of an idealistic tendency", VS Naipaul is an ironic and controversial choice.
In his 45-year career as a novelist and travel writer he has built a reputation as the foremost literary interpreter for a British and American readership of the post-colonial world. Yet his vision is marred, in the view of many, by bitter pessimism and prejudice masquerading as truth.
An earlier Nobel laureate, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott, parodied Naipaul in a poem as "VS Nightfall", and called him "our finest writer of the English sentence" whose beautiful prose is "scarred by scrofula", not least in his "repulsion towards Negroes".
Among other distinguished detractors have been the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and other Caribbean writers: CLR James, George Lamming and Caryl Phillips.
Naipaul was born in 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad. He moved to Britain in 1950 on a scholarship to University College, Oxford. Writing from the late 1950s, his subject quickly became the "inbetweenness" of the colonial and post-colonial condition.
His earliest works arguably remain his best, including his masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which is based on his father's life and has a character, Anand, resembling the young Vidia. Yet Naipaul's vision darkened as he embraced the "two spheres of darkness" which he came to see as his subject: the childhood world of an ancestral India, and the colonial world beyond his West Indian upbringing.
His travel book on the Caribbean, The Middle Passage (1962), commissioned by the then prime minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, set the tone of dyspeptic snobbery that became his hallmark, from its first sentence: "There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West Indies."
The trip to India that produced An Area of Darkness (1964) and later India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977) was more traumatic, as Naipaul's childhood faith in his ancestral "home" was dispelled by his encounter with its dirt and poverty. In his later India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), he confessed to his earlier shame and "neurosis" as a "feaful traveller." But his neuroses arguably pervade his vision.
He turned his experience of "half-made societies", such as Congo and Argentina, "places created by the colonial system", into increasingly negative and apocalyptic fiction, as the influence of Dickens gave way to that of Conrad.
The Mimic Men (1967), the Booker-winning In A Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), and A Bend in the River (1979), ridiculed those imitating former colonial masters and set out to expose the follies and corruption of national liberation movements.
Naipaul was by no means the sole critic of third world nationalism and corruption. He was one of many writers of the receding empire beginning to be published in London in the 1950s and 1960s, including the West Indians Sam Selvon and George Lamming, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and the Indians RK Narayan and Raja Rao. Yet he was the one anointed as the west's post-colonial mandarin - for, many would argue, reasons other than literary merit.
Naipaul has always sought to position himself as a lone, stateless observer, devoid of ideology or affiliation, peers or rivals, a truth-teller without the illusions of his inferiors. Yet many see him as an heir to colonial writers, reinforcing distortions that others were striving to correct.
Naipaul hints that true history happens only when the third world is touched by Europe. His vision of the post-colonial world is suffused with tired notions of barbarism and the primitive, cannibalism and the "bush".
Naipaul's fiction entered a third, "autumnal" phase after the deaths of his sister Sati in 1984 and brother, the writer Shiva, in 1985. The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994), and Half A Life (2001) combine elegaic, autobiographical elements with wider histories, of post-war migration and the new world. Those seeking signs of mellowing have found none.
His books on Islam, Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), were dismissed by Said as an "intellectual catastrophe" which revealed a dislike of Islam as "the worst disaster that happened to India".
While Naipaul claims to have retired behind the voices of the people he meets on his travels, his innocence and objectivity as an observer remain suspect.
