V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel Prize-winning writer from Trinidad who penned comic masterpieces of island life before turning to the larger world, traveling from South America to Africa and Asia for richly detailed works on postcolonial states, died Aug. 11 at his home in London. He was 85.

His family announced the death in a statement. The cause was not immediately known.

In the second half of the 20th century, few writers were as praised - or scorned - as Naipaul, a prose stylist with talent as great as his penchant for controversy. "If a writer doesn't generate hostility," Naipaul once said, "he is dead."

Sir Vidia, as he was sometimes known after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990, faced accusations of racism, sexism, chauvinism and Islamophobia. He had long-running literary spats with Paul Theroux, a former protege who lambasted Naipaul as "a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone," and the poet Derek Walcott, a Caribbean peer who depicted Naipaul in a poem as "a rodent in old age."

VS Naipaul wrote "A House for Mr. Biswas," the book that vaulted him to acclaim, when he was in his 20s, after moving to England on a scholarship to the University of Oxford (AFP)

He acknowledged frequenting prostitutes while married, physically abusing his mistress and treating his wife in such a way, he told biographer Patrick French, that "it could be said that I had killed her." Through it all, he expressed few regrets and maintained a prodigious output, publishing more than two dozen volumes that ranged from novels to travelogues to genre-bending works that mixed fiction with personal history.

His books - which included the realist novels "A House for Mr. Biswas" (1961), "A Bend in the River" (1979) and the Man Booker Prize-winning "In a Free State" (1971) - were considered works of a technical virtuoso, whom even Walcott hailed as "our finest writer of the English sentence." With few exceptions, his sentences were knife-sharp, devoid of fuss or flair but often lyrical in their simplicity.

Naipaul wrote "Biswas," the book that vaulted him to acclaim, when he was in his 20s, after moving to England on a scholarship to the University of Oxford.

The book's central figure, Mohun Biswas, was based loosely on Naipaul's father, a journalist with literary aspirations. "Six-fingered, and born in the wrong way," Biswas seeks a home of his own, and the sense of security and personal freedom that property might offer.

The story "was Dickensian in its scope and sympathy, yet wholly original," cultural critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff wrote in the New Yorker in 1994, with dozens of characters and settings that extended from the crowded streets of Trinidad's capital to quiet sugar-cane plantations.

Like Naipaul's three previous books, including his 1959 story collection "Miguel Street," it mixed tragicomic moments - endless fights between Biswas and his in-laws - and scenes that seemed to capture the author's private longing for stability and satisfaction.

VS Naipaul acknowledged frequenting prostitutes while married, physically abusing his mistress and treating his wife in such a way, he told biographer Patrick French, that "it could be said that I had killed her"

"In the gloom, a boy was leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road," Naipaul wrote in one passage, describing the title character's lingering memory of a late-afternoon bus ride. "He wore a vest and nothing more. The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level sugar-cane fields. Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a boy who didn't know where the road, and that bus, went."

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Naipaul was initially known as a gentle chronicler of West Indian life, seen by some critics as part of a group that included Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming and Walcott, who was from Saint Lucia.

After "Biswas," however, Naipaul rarely wrote about his country with any warmth. Trinidad, Naipaul wrote in the 1962 travelogue "The Middle Passage," was "unimportant, uncreative, cynical," home to "a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient."

Naipaul later said that the book, named for a stage of the slave trade in which Africans were taken in bondage to the Americas, was "terribly flawed" and overly harsh in its criticism of Trinidad and its Caribbean neighbors.

"In the gloom, a boy was leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road," VS Naipaul wrote in one passage in "A House for Mr. Biswas", describing the title character's lingering memory of a late-afternoon bus ride. "He wore a vest and nothing more. The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level sugar-cane fields. Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a boy who didn't know where the road, and that bus, went."

Still, it was a critical success, and engendered a succession of travels and travelogues. He visited India for three books, beginning with "An Area of Darkness" (1964), and traveled to the majority-Muslim countries of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia for "Among the Believers" (1981) and "Beyond Belief" (1998).

His travel writings were often anatomies of catastrophe, profiles of communities that Naipaul described as "half-made" or decaying, and peppered with disdain for the former colonizers and the recently decolonized.

To some critics, Naipaul offered what New Yorker writer Jane Kramer called "a topography of the void," perceptive criticism of imperialism and oppression. To others, his work had a racist tinge. Literary critic Edward Said described Naipaul as "a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him," and called out in particular his depiction of Islam as a rage-filled, imperialistic faith.

VS Naipaul described a "little imp" inside his soul, a mischievous spirit that not infrequently carried him away, and said he was proudest of his mature travel writing, not his novels, despite the criticism they sometimes drew

Naipaul did little to comfort his skeptics. "Africans need to be kicked," he once said, "that's the only thing they understand." When critic and writer Elizabeth Hardwick asked him in 1979 why some Indian women wear a red dot on their forehead, referring to the bindi, Naipaul said it signified that "my head is empty."

He described a "little imp" inside his soul, a mischievous spirit that not infrequently carried him away, and said he was proudest of his mature travel writing, not his novels, despite the criticism they sometimes drew.

A 1975 journey to report on the Zaire (now Congo) of military ruler Mobutu Sese Seko led to "A Bend in the River," a 280-page novel that recalled Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The book detailed the rise of an image-obsessed, Mobutu-like despot known as the Big Man, but began with a philosophical pronouncement: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

It was a cold view that Naipaul considered merely realistic, born from his travels and impoverished upbringing.

A 1975 journey to report on the Zaire (now Congo) of military ruler Mobutu Sese Seko led to "A Bend in the River," a 280-page novel that recalled Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The book detailed the rise of an image-obsessed, Mobutu-like despot known as the Big Man, but began with a philosophical pronouncement: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

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Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born to a Hindu family in Chaguanas on Aug. 17, 1932, 30 years before the island and its smaller neighbor, Tobago, declared independence from Britain. His paternal grandfather came to Trinidad as an indentured servant from northern India, and his father was a reporter at the Trinidad Guardian. His mother came from a family of high-caste landowners that had lost much of its fortune.

Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, lauded by the Nobel committee "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

"I never had a plan," he said in his Nobel lecture, crediting his success in part to luck. "At every stage, I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and talent and worldview. Those things developed book by book. And I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself."