Which author's 'A House for Mr Biswas' drew on Trinidad?

V.S. Naipaul, whose novel of 1961 follows a man of Indian descent in colonial Trinidad trying, through a life of failures, to own a house that is his own rather than his wife's family's. It is closely based on Naipaul's father, a journalist with literary ambitions who never escaped.

The comedy is the achievement. A book about a man ground down by dependence and small humiliations is very funny for long stretches, and the house he finally gets is jerry-built, overpriced and mortgaged - a triumph and a swindle at once. It is generally reckoned his best, and he wrote it at 29.

The reputation is difficult and deliberately so. Naipaul won the Nobel in 2001 and spent decades making remarks about Africa, Islam, India and women writers that ranged from bleak to indefensible; he authorised a biography while alive that recorded his treatment of his wife and his mistress in detail he declined to soften. Edward Said and Derek Walcott attacked him at length. The usual position now is that the early Trinidad books are unarguable and the later travel writing has to be read with the author in view, which is roughly how he wanted to be read anyway.