(CNN) Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad but lived most of his life in England, died in his London home Saturday, Britain's Press Association reported, citing Naipaul's wife.

He was 85.

In awarding him the $1 million Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised Naipaul for combining genres into his own style that compels readers "to see the presence of suppressed histories. ... In a vigilant style, (he) transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony."

The Nobel judges singled out as his "masterpiece" the 1987 work "The Enigma of Arrival."

His first book was a novel, "The Mystic Masseur" in 1957. Other titles include "Miguel Street;" "A House for Mr. Biswas," with a protagonist based on Naipaul's father; "The Loss of El Dorado," a colonial history of Trinidad; and "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples," on the eastern regions of the Islamic world.

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