[7] On awarding Naipaul the prize, the Swedish Academy singled out his book The Enigma of Arrival (1987) for particular praise, calling it "an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the decline of European neighbourhoods".

[3] Other contenders tipped to be in the running for the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature included Israel's Amos Oz, South Africa's J.M.

In the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet professor Sture Linnér praised Naipaul's writing: "He is one of the greatest, not just in our generation but on the whole in modern literature."

Gellerfelt argued that Naipaul had his best time as a writer long behind him, a "postcolonial literature's favourite grandad", and pointed out three superior candidates for the prize: "In the art of writing novels there are today giants such as Antonio Lobo Antunes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, perhaps the three most prominent novelists alive and still remarkably active and productive, right in the middle of a creativity booming with vigour.

"[9] British author Martin Amis praised the Swedish Academy's choice of Naipaul, "His level of perception is of the highest, and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realising those perceptions on the page," Amis said, adding that Naipaul's travel writing "is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century".