No woman writer can equal me: Naipaul

No stranger to controversy for his provocative remarks, 2001 Nobel literature winner V S Naipaul has said women writers are not equal to him and called them possessing “narrow view of the world”.

His sexist comment sparked worldwide reactions immediately.

According to UK media reports, when in an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday he was questioned if he considered any woman writer matching his talent, Naipaul said: “I don’t think so.”

He even said of Jane Austen that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

He said women writers are “quite different”. “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

Naipaul criticized women for “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.

“And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.

He said: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of indentured labourers shipped from India, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, is best known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire’s colonialism, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

He has also written several travel books. He has been called “a master of modern English prose.”

He has been awarded numerous literary prizes including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1958), the Somerset Maugham Award (1960), the Hawthornden Prize (1964), the W. H. Smith Literary Award (1968), the Booker Prize (1971), the Jerusalem Prize (1983) and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British Literature (1993).

In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.