The Trinidad-born British novelist, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, has died at the age of 85, “surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” his wife has said. Over his career, Oxford-educated Naipaul wrote dozens of critically acclaimed books and won numerous coveted literary awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”