Tickets still available for the opening of babel’s fourth season

Just Buffalo’s Babel lecture series, which showcases international authors who write in English, returns on Tuesday, October 19. This season, Babel’s fourth, opens with Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul.

Naipaul is from Trinidad and Tobago. A novelist and essayist, Naipaul has been awarded numerous literary prizes including the Nobel Prize in Literature. Naipaul’s personal life and literary works are controversial. He provides a narrative about the developing world to Western society yet he claims “to have a political view is to be prejudiced. I don’t have a political view.” While his supporters say that he presents a critique of left-liberals, his detractors say that he is a neo-colonial apologist. Interpretations of Naipaul’s political views aside, both his fiction and travel writing offer an unflinching portrayal of the developing world. For Naipaul’s visit, Just Buffalo recommends reading A House for Mr. Biswas.

—jill greenberg