Generally considered the leading novelist of the English-speaking Caribbean, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 2001. Naipaul’s writings dealt with the cultural confusion of the Third World and the problem of an outsider, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England, and a nomadic intellectual in a postcolonial world. Naipaul has also arisen much controversy because of his politically incorrect views of the “half-made societies.” He has constantly refused to avoid unwelcome topics, characterizing his role as a writer “to look and to look again, to re-look and rethink.”
“The facts about Columbus have always been known. In his own writings and in all his actions his egoism is like an exposed deformity; he condemns himself. But the heroic gloss, which is not even his own, has come down through the centuries.” (from ‘Columbus and Crusoe’, in The Overcrowded Barracoon, 1972)
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