Memoir

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'My purpose is not literary criticism or biography. I wish only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which I was exposed.' For the 'serious traveller', one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul's own father), to which is added the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world). There is England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way, and inevitably for a colonial Indian there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi. Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer's People is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. 'The greatest writer now living in Britain. His courage in seeing and telling the truth represents a level of high seriousness that has all but vanished'

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V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River , and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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"Naipaul offers a liberating frankness. It's a rare and oddly exhilarating thing to encounter a master so manifestly unconcerned with being liked . . . The reputations of Austen, James and Hardy, after all, will most likely survive Naipaul's disdain, but if even one outraged devotee of those giants is turned on to Bond or Selvon or Chaudhuri, then A Writer's People will have done a noble service." -- "Ottawa Citizen ""[W]hat remains impressive . . . is Naipaul's sense of wonder at the worlds he has discovered. . . . Few writers have traveled as far from their origins as Naipaul has, and done it so willingly and with such single-mindedness, and few have regretted that estrangement quite so much." -- "The New York Times ""A brilliant work from a man who more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer." --"The Observer" "Naipaul writes wonderfully well. He is opinionated, tells gripping stories, loves beyond all else the specificity of details." --"The Independent" "Told in elegantly succinct prose, this deft book offers glimpses of autobiography as well as biography." --"Daily Mail"