LONDON — V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose precise and lyrical writing in such novels as “A Bend in the River” and “A House for Mr. Biswas” and brittle, misanthropic personality made him one of the world’s most admired and contentious writers, died at his London home, his family said. He was 85.

His wife, Nadira Naipaul, said he was “a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavor.”

His friend and fellow author Paul Theroux said that Naipaul had been in poor health prior to his death on Saturday, but had taken pride in having his work recognized.

“He will go down as one of the greatest writers of our time,” Theroux told The Associated Press during a telephone interview, citing his mastery of writing about families and colonialism. “He also never wrote falsely. He was a scourge of anyone who used a cliché or an un-thought out sentence. He was very scrupulous about his writing, very severe, too.”

Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction reflected his personal journey from Trinidad to London and various stops in developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

In an extraordinary career spanning half a century, Naipaul traveled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from his rural childhood to upper class England, and was hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. From “A Bend in the River” to “The Enigma of Arrival” to “Finding the Centre,” Naipaul’s books explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world.

He was critical of colonialism, but set himself apart from any social movements. He saw himself as a realist, cured of illusions, his outlook defined by the famous opening words of “A Bend in the River” that became the title of a biography by Patrick French: “The world is what it is.”