V. S. Naipaul

Some Lesser Known Facts About V. S. Naipaul

• When he was 7 years old, Naipaul’s family moved to Trinidad’s capital Port of Spain.

• When he turned 17, he won a Trinidad government scholarship to study abroad. The scholarship gave him the opportunity to study any subject at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth, but he chose to go to Oxford to do a degree in English.

• He has published more than thirty books over fifty years.

• In 1953, he failed in an examination due to which he could not attain his degree.

• In 1954, V. S Naipaul moved to London due to unemployment and lack of money at home. In London he took shelter in his cousin’s flat.

• In 1954, he was offered a job opportunity by the producer of BBC as a presenter for a weekly program. He conducted interviews, wrote various articles and reviews and presented weekly programs there.  He worked with BBC and Caribbean Voices till 1958.

• In 1955, V. S Naipaul wrote a story of about 3000 words based on his childhood memory of his neighbour in Port of Spain’s street. The story touched his fellow writers John Stockbridge, Andrew Salkey, and Gordon Woolford, who later encouraged him to write more often and publish books.

• In 1955, he shifted along with his first wife Patricia Ann Hale in a flat in Kilburn, London.

• In 1957, he worked as an editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association, which published the magazine concrete quarterly.

• In 1957, Francis Wyndham, an English writer gave him a part time job of reviewing books monthly at New Statesman. He left that job in 1961.

• In 1961, he was invited by the premier of Trinidad and Tobago of West Indian Federation, to visit countries including British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica to write a book on the Carribean. He wrote his first travel writing The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962).

• Some of his novels include A House for Mr Biswas (1961), A Flag on the Island (1967), In a Free State (1971), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and Magic Seeds (2004).