V. S. Naipaul

Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, the grandson of Indian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean to work sugar plantations; his father's own thwarted literary ambitions shaped his childhood. A scholarship took him to Oxford in 1950, and he never returned to live in Trinidad, settling permanently in England and writing A House for Mr Biswas as an elegy for his father.

He spent decades traveling the postcolonial world (India, Africa, the Islamic world) for the unsparing travel books and novels, including A Bend in the River, that made him as controversial as he was acclaimed, and drew accusations of contempt for the societies he documented. He was knighted in 1990.

He won the Nobel Prize in 2001 and remained combative to the end, feuding publicly with fellow writers including Paul Theroux. He died in London in 2018.