Prolific novelist, nonfiction writer, and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, V.S. Naipaul, has passed away at his home in London, a statement by his family has confirmed. He was 85.

In such novels such as A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State, which was awarded the Booker Prize, and nonfiction works such as The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, Naipaul chronicled the lives of exiles and migrants, and the legacy of colonialism. He also wrote about his travels to India, Argentina, Trinidad (the country of his birth), Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia in such works as The Return of Eva Perón and Among the Believers.

When awarding him the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described him as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.” They also commended his work for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

But, in addition to the Nobel Prize, Naipaul’s work garnered much criticism over the years. Chinua Achebe criticized his portraits of Africans (he called Naipaul “a new purveyor of the old comforting myths” about the white West), and Naipaul was also criticized for his sexist portrayals of women in A Bend in the River and in Guerrillas.

Indeed, many agree that Naipaul was a master of the English sentence, but this is where all agreement about the novelist and his work stops. Naipaul is survived by his second wife, the journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi.

Read Vimi Bajaj’s appreciation of the author, “The Work Began to Disfigure Itself: The Contradictory Genius of V.S. Naipaul,” in the December 2017 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, which can be accessed in our Features Archive.

Image Credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times