Election Section

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — V.S. Naipaul, a writer of aching humor and grim reality, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for his “incorruptible scrutiny” of postcolonial society and his critical assessments of Muslim fundamentalism. 

Naipaul, 69, a British novelist and essayist born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent, started with the West Indian island as his first subject. He extended his writings to include India, Africa, “America from south to north,” England and the Islamic communities of Asia. 

The Nobel Literature Prize, first awarded to French author Sully Prudhomme in 1901, is worth $943,000 in this centennial year. 

“I am utterly delighted. This is an unexpected accolade,” Naipaul said in a statement issued by publishing agency Colman Getty. “It is a great tribute to both England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors.” 

The 215-year-old Swedish Academy singled out his 1987 autobiographical novel, “The Enigma of Arrival,” saying the author created an “unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighborhoods.” 

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul left Trinidad at the age of 18, when he traveled to England to study at Oxford. Naipaul, whose other famous books include “A House for Mr. Biswas” and “A Bend in the River,” writes in English. 

The prize committee also pointed to his travel books and documentary works in which he criticizes Muslim fundamentalism in Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan in “Among the Believers” (1981) and “Beyond Belief” (1998). 

Academy head Horace Engdahl conceded this year’s choice might be seen as political in the wake of terror attacks in the United States and the American retaliation. “The present situation perhaps will make room for a more muted reaction,” he said. “I don’t think we will have violent protests from the Islamic countries and if they take the care to read his travel books from that part of the world they will realize that his view of Islam is a lot more nuanced.” 

“What he’s really attacking in Islam is a particular trait that it has in common with all cultures that conquerors bring along, that it tends to obliterate the preceding culture,” he said. At a reading in London last week, Naipaul condemned what he called the “calamitous effect” of Islam and compared it to colonialism. 

“To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘My ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter,”’ he said. Naipaul has the reputation of being a tough-minded, misanthropic man who does not engage in such literary rituals as publishing parties and flattering blurbs for his peers. In “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” a highly unflattering book published in 1998, former friend Paul Theroux wrote that “he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament.” 

In recent remarks, Naipaul mocked E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other novels. “He just knew the court and a few middle-class Indians and a few garden boys whom he wished to seduce,” Naipaul said in an interview with the Literary Review. He also took on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” saying that “Joyce was going blind and I can’t understand the work of a blind writer.” 

In fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has described the upheaval of newly independent nations and the people who live with one foot in the remnants of their ancient culture and one in the culture of their colonial masters. 

“The history I carried with me, together with the self-awareness that had come with my education and ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of glory dead,” Naipaul wrote in “The Enigma of Arrival.” 

Martin Amis, the British novelist and critic, said he was delighted by Naipaul’s win.  

“His level of perception is of the highest, and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realizing those perceptions on the page,” Amis sai. 

d, adding that Naipaul’s travel writing “is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century.” 

The academy cited Naipaul for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” 

Last year’s winner was little-known exiled Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian, a French citizen. His award was denounced by the Chinese government as political. Italy’s Dario Fo and Germany’s Guenter Grass are other recent winners with strong political views. 

The 18 lifetime members of the academy make the selection in deep secrecy at one of their weekly Thursday meetings and nominees are not publicly revealed for 50 years. 

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, offered only vague guidance about the prizes in his will, saying only the award should go to those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” and “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” The awards always are handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896. 

The Nobels started Monday with the naming of medicine prize winners, followed by the physics award on Tuesday and chemistry and economics on Wednesday. 

The peace prize is to be announced on Friday in Oslo, Norway.