Sir Vidia Naipaul is one of our greatest prose stylists. Born in Trinidad, in 1932, he shot to fame in the late Fifties with his comic portraits of Trinidad society The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas. Since then, his novels and works of non-fiction, based both in Tinidad and England, and exploring colonial and post colonial society, have been garlanded with prizes and awards. In 1994, he was elected a Companion of Literature by his fellow Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2003 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’. John Carey is Chief Critic at the Sunday Times, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Recorded on Monday 11 December 2006.