A Writer's People

An astonishingly candid book from the Nobel Laureate about what has shaped his interpretation of literature and the world. For the "serious traveller", one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author's purpose, then, "is not literary criticism or biography", but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul's own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi. Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer's People is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers.

“Essential reading . . . it offers the insights and observations - on literature, history and cultural sensibility - of an honest and truly global thinker.”

Essential reading . . . it offers the insights and observations – on literature, history and cultural sensibility – of an honest and truly global thinker. Evening Standard
The greatest writer now living in Britain. His courage in seeing and telling the truth represents a level of high seriousness that has all but vanished. Sunday Times
Naipaul has a sharp visual sense . . . And then there is his chiselled prose, elegant and economical: who, now living, writes as well as he? Financial Times

V S Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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