Portrait of an author: V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Last published: The Masque Of Africa: Glimpses Of African Belief (Picador, 2010)

And it was clear that here (Alexandria), and not in Greece, the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger.

Here was to be learned the importance of the guide, the man who knew local customs, the fixer to whom badly printed illiterate forms held no mysteries. ‘Write here,’ my guide said in the customs house, aswirl with porters and guides and officials and idlers and policemen and travellers and a Greek refugee whispering in my ear, ‘Let me warn you. They are stealing tonight.’

— From An Area Of Darkness (1964)

A 12-part series of portraits selected for Lounge by Rohit Chawla, who has photographed over 200 authors at the Jaipur Literature Festival over a decade.