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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul TC known as Vidia Naipaul or V. S. Naipaul, was a British writer who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Trinidad in a family with Indian roots, resided in England as an adult, and traveled across and wrote about India, Africa, the Islamic world, and South and North America in his novels and non-fiction works. 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. He published more than thirty books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some fifty years. Naipaul was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago. He was the second child of Droapatie Capildeo and Seepersad Naipaul. His younger brother was the writer Shiva Naipaul. In the 1880s, his grandparents had migrated from India to work as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations. In the Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became an English-language journalist, and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian. In 1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent. In 'A prologue to an autobiography' (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer. Naipaul in his 2001 Nobel Prize lecture Two worlds, speculated that he may be paternally linked to Nepal: Naipaul's mother came from a prosperous family. In 1939, when he was six years old, Naipaul's family moved in with them in a big house in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain. There, Naipaul enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, a well-regarded school that was modelled after a British public school. Upon graduation, Naipaul won a Trinidad Government scholarship that allowed him to study at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth; he chose Oxford. At University College, Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability and calling, he became depressed. In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he quickly spent all he had saved. He called his impulsive trip 'a nervous breakdown'. Thirty years later, he called it something like a mental illness. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul TC known as Vidia Naipaul or V. S. Naipaul, was a British writer who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Trinidad in a family with Indian roots, resided in England as an adult, and traveled across and wrote about India, Africa, the Islamic world, and South and North America in his novels and non-fiction works. He is known for