British author VS Naipaul is renowned as a brilliant writing talent who has attacked religion, politicians and pillars of the literary establishment during a glittering career.
The award to the 69-year-old of the Nobel Prize for Literature follows earlier honours which have included the Booker Prize in 1971, the David Cohen Literature Prize in 1993 and a knighthood in 1990.
Naipaul's books on Islamic fundamentalism - the 1981 work Among the Believersand the 1998 book Beyond Belief- were written after he travelled through non-Arab "converted" Islamic countries.
His attacks on the religion prompted leading academic Mr Edward Said to say: "It is hard to believe any rational person would attack an entire culture on that scale."
Naipaul was also not scared of criticising the considered greats of English literature. He once said Charles Dickens "died from self parody" and described the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie as "an extreme form of literary criticism".
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, a market town where his father Seepersad was a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian.
When he was six, the family moved to Port of Spain, Trinidad's capital, which became the setting for his first novel in 1959, Miguel Street.
Over a 45-year career Naipaul has written 26 books.
His father passed unfulfilled writing ambitions to Naipaul but the author later attacked Trinidad itself. He described it as "unimportant, uncreative, cynical... a dot on the map."
In 1948 though, Naipaul won a Trinidad government scholarship to read English at University College, Oxford from 1950-54. It was a time of loneliness for Naipaul, who suffered a nervous breakdown. A suicide attempt failed when his gas meter ran out.
In 1955, he married Patricia Hale whom he met at Oxford.
Critics regard his 1961 novel, A House for Mr Biswas, as Naipaul's masterpiece. It was based on his father's life and with a character, Annand, resembling a young Naipaul.
The author then went on to look at his ancestral routes in India. He revealed a dislike for Westerners who found spiritual succour in India where he found only dirt and disease.
But in 1990, Naipaul wrote With India: A Million Mutinies Now, which claimed there had been an intellectual regeneration in the country.
His sister, Sati, died in 1984, and brother Shiva - also a writer - died in 1985. His first wife died in 1996 but later that year he married Nadia Khannum Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist 25 years his junior.
He now lives in Wiltshire and remains one of literature's great enigmas.
Yet the author himself appears to have a simple, straightforward view of his works.
"I didn't make the world," Naipaul once said. "I tried to record it accurately and without prejudice. To have a political view is to be prejudiced. I don't have a political view."
PA