Candid Naipaul life tipped for £30,000 prize
Mark Brown, arts correspondent writing in The Guardian , Thursday May 15, 2008

An authorised but markedly unsanitised biography of VS Naipaul is contending with a history of 20th-century music and an insight into the minds of crows for the world's richest non-fiction book prize.
Books on Africa, Stalin's Russia and a scandalous Victorian murder complete the six books named today as the shortlist for this year's BBC 4 Samuel Johnson prize.
Rosie Boycott, the chair of judges, said the list contained "murder, betrayal, brutality, beauty and tales of the unexpected".

Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, The World is What it is, has already generated headlines for its frankness and is the bookmakers' favourite to win the £30,000 top
prize, with William Hill quoting odds of 5-2. Naipaul's self-evidently awful treatment of women - including his confession that his cruelty may have killed his wife - prompted the commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to write a piece headlined: I'll buy no more books by this monster.

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