V S Naipaul: All you need to know about Nobel Prize winner for Literature

New Delhi : Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "Vidia" Naipaul passed away at his home in London on Saturday. His wife Lady Naipaul said in a statement that "he died surrounded by all the people he loved, having lived a life full of wonderful creativity and effort".

He was an Indo-Caribbean writer and Nobel Laureate who was born in Trinidad with British citizenship. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, V.S. Naipaul also won the Booker Prize in 1971, and was considered one of the most important writers in the English language of the 20th and 21st centuries, Efe reported.

He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels.

In his fifty years of writing, he published over 30 books both fictional and non fictional.

Born to an Indian immigrants in Chaguanas, he travelled to UK in 1950 and entered the University of Oxford after winning a government scholorship.

He began his literary career in 1961 and since then has written about 30 books, although it was the novel "A House for Mr Biswas" that launched him to fame.

Here is a list of his novels:

Fiction

The Mystic Masseur  (1957) – film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)

The Suffrage of Elvira  (1958)

Miguel Street  (1959)

A House for Mr Biswas  (1961)

Mr Stone and the Knights Companion  (1963)

The Mimic Men  (1967)

A Flag on the Island  (1967)

In a Free State  (1971) – Booker Prize

Guerrillas  (1975)

A Bend in the River  (1979)

The Enigma of Arrival  (1987)

A Way in the World  (1994)

Half a Life  (2001)

The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories) – (2002)

Magic Seeds  (2004)

Non-fiction

The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)

An Area of Darkness (1964)

The Loss of El Dorado  (1969)

The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

A Congo Diary (1980), published by Sylvester & Orphanos

The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)

Finding the Centre: Two Narratives  (1984)

A Turn in the South (1989)

India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)

Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)

The Writer and the World: Essays (2002)

A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007)

The Masque of Africa (2010)