V S Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in August 1932. His novels include The Mimic Men (1967), winner of the 1968 WH Smith Literary Award and In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction.V S Naipaul was knighted in 1989. He was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize by the Arts Council of England in 1993 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He holds honorary doctorates from Cambridge University and Columbia University in New York, and honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford. He has also been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize 2009.Naipaul lives in Wiltshire, England.