Winner of the 1971 Booker Prize and 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, Naipaul had been a great supporter of the SoA for more than 60 years.

He became a member in January 1956, shortly before the publication of his first novel The Mystic Masseur, and in 1961 he was a recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award, which he used to fund his travels through India.

He became a serving member of the SoA Management Committee in 1965, and was nominated to our Council in 1981.

When Naipaul won the British Literature Prize in 1993, he nominated £10,000 of it to the Society of Authors, to be used for the encouragement of a young writer. The prize was awarded to Rosemary Hill for her biography of Augustus Pugin, published as God’s Architect in 2007.