V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018)

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian descent, won a scholarship to Oxford, moved to London, and spent his adult life in the peripheral position he understood best: the outside observer, the man who belonged nowhere completely and saw everything more clearly for it.

His prose has what the Nobel committee called "incorruptible scrutiny" — a gaze that applies the same clinical precision to colonial societies, post-colonial disorders, and the private failures of individuals, and finds in all of them the same evasions, the same distance between the story a people tell about themselves and the reality beneath that story. He was not kind. He was, in the most demanding sense, honest.

A House for Mr Biswas is his warmest novel — a comedy of a man's lifelong, partially successful attempt to own a house, which is also the attempt to be a self, to leave a mark, to matter. It is a great book. Naipaul was not always a good man. The two facts coexist in his work without resolution, which is itself a form of honesty.

He received the Nobel Prize in 2001 for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny."

His Nobel Lecture (2001), "Two Worlds", opens: "I have given readings and not lectures… I have no lecture to give." Then he gave one. Read it, or watch him, at NobelPrize.org.