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I didn’t know that VS Naipaul lived in Kilburn

The writer Vidiadhar (Vidia) Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad, where his father was a journalist in the local newspaper. In the 1880s the family had emigrated from India to work on a sugar plantation. 

Vidia was educated at Queen’s Royal College, a high performing school in Port of Spain, which was run like a British public school. Before he was 17, he won a government scholarship to study English at University College Oxford, where he arrived in 1950. 

About halfway through his degree course he became lonely and depressed. Then in February 1952, at a college play, Naipaul met Patricia Hale, who was studying history. They became a couple and Pat supported and encouraged Vidia’s writing. In 1954 he came to London while Pat went to Birmingham, her hometown, to do a further degree.

Vidia desperately needed a job, and he was fortunate that in December 1954 Henry Swanzy who produced the weekly BBC Caribbean Voices, offered him a three-month renewable contract as presenter of the radio program. 

Initially, he stayed with his cousin at a rundown flat, 70 Bravington Road in West Kilburn. Then at the end of 1954, with help from a BBC doorman, Vidia found a bedsit at 14 St Julian’s Road just behind the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn. The second floor flat had a bedroom with a small kitchen and a shared communal bathroom. 

On 10 Jan 1955 he and Pat got married at the Willesden register office, but they did not tell their parents. Initially, Pat stayed in Birmingham to finish her studies and came to Kilburn at the weekend. Then she moved to St Julian’s Road and worked as a supply teacher in LCC schools. 

At the BBC, Vidia presented the program once a week, wrote short reviews and conducted interviews. Fortunately, the old Langham Hotel opposite Broadcasting House had a room where freelance writers could meet, and this provided him with camaraderie and fellowship. Here he wrote a collection of short stories based on growing up in Port of Spain. The publisher André Deutsch, and his editor Diana Athill liked the stories and encouraged him to write a novel, ‘The Mystic Masseur’, which was accepted in December 1955, but not published until June 1957. 

After living for two and a half years in Kilburn, he and Pat moved to Muswell Hill and later to Streatham.

Naipaul’s breakthrough novel, ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ was published in 1961. 

Sometimes controversial, he became very successful, and wrote more than thirty books over a fifty year period. In 1971 he won the Booker Prize for ‘In a Free State’, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He was knighted in 1990. 

        VS Naipaul by Lord Snowden (1979, NPG) 

 There is an excellent biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French (2008), ‘The World Is What It Is’.
 

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