This was a time when Naipaul felt rejuvenated by his travels. He won the Nobel Prize in 2001. Since the 1970s to the early 1990s, Naipaul remained a favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The rumours stopped only when Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992. After this, nobody thought it was possible for another writer from the Caribbean to win this award until Naipaul actually won it in 2001. A long-cherished dream came true, and Naipaul was very gracious in accepting it. Earlier, he had come to believe that he would not be given the Nobel Prize because he didn’t ‘represent anything’ (Blandford 1979, p. 51). But, true to himself, he sparked an immediate controversy by leaving out Trinidad in his initial response upon receiving the news of the award. There was a huge response from Trinidad and the Caribbean, with most people calling him an ungrateful son of the soil. Naipaul did little to make amends. In his Nobel Acceptance lecture, ‘Two Worlds,’ he did pay a lengthy tribute to Trinidad, though the lecture was more about his journey from Trinidad than about Trinidad. On his visit to Trinidad for a conference in his honour in 2007, his wife addressed a press conference upon his arrival at the airport, taking the blame for his initial reaction. It was a ploy to reduce resistance to his visit.

After a gap of nearly two decades, Naipaul got back to writing two novels. Having pronounced the novel dead quite early in the 1970s, Naipaul returned to the form. He wrote a story about the life of Willie Chandran, an Indian from India and his journeys across England, Africa, Germany and India. The story was narrated in two parts, Half-a-Life and Magic Seeds, each good as standalone novels by themselves. Naipaul’s scope of writing was truly international. The protagonist studied the consequences of his actions, not the world at large. Naipaul had come to accept that the world is what it is and it is the actions that make or break an individual. The decade began with Naipaul paying another tribute to his father and Trinidad with a long essay, ‘Reading and Writing’ followed by the Nobel Acceptance lecture.