M A I N   N E W S

Naipaul wins Nobel for Literature

Stockholm, October 11
Trinidad-born British author V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Literature Prize today for works that “compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories,” the Swedish Academy said.

“V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice. “Singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models he has wrought existing genres into a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance,” the Academy said in its citation.

He will take home the prize sum of 10 million kronor or close to one million dollars.

Naipaul will receive the award, along with the other Nobel laureates, from the hands of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at the official ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prizes’ creator, Swedish scholar and inventor Alfred Nobel.

Last year, the prize went to French Chinese-language writer Gao Xingjian for a body of work that has opened “new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”.

LONDON: V.S. Naipaul said on Thursday he was delighted at being awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“I am utterly delighted; this is an unexpected accolade. It is a great tribute to England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors and to the dedication and support of my agent Gillon Aitken,” he said.

Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990, has won numerous major writing prizes, including the Booker Prize in 1971 and the David Cohen British literature prize in 1993.

President K.R. Narayanan and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today congratulated Naipaul for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.