MOTIVATION

A Caribbean born Indian, a man with no real roots though having several, an eminent narrator in Conrad’s language, who knows how to turn himself into a great reporter of ordinary life, careful to ideas without ever forgetting people and facts, with India, V. S. Naipaul has been able to make a book of inquiry and travel throughout contemporary India become an adventure od Dantean kind.

The prize will be handed over by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

BIOGRAPHY

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, also known as V.S. Naipaul (Chaguanas, 17 agosto 1932), is a British-Trinidadian author. Amongst the greatest living writers, Sir Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, a small village in the island of Trinidad in 1932, from Indian parents of the Brahmin caste. V.S. Naipaul moved to England in 1950 where he read at Oxford. In 1990 Queen Elizabeth bestows upon him the title of Knight Bachelor, three years later, in 1993, he is the first winner of the David Cohen British Literature Prize, and in 1999 he receives the Grinzane Cavour Prize. He receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, with the following motivation: “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.