The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

Patrick Rollo Basil French (1966–2023) was a British historian, biographer, and author renowned for his works on South Asia, including Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division (1997), Tibet, Tibet (2003), The World Is What It Is, the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul (2008, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hawthornden Prize), and India: A Portrait (2011). He received the Somerset Maugham Award and Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize for Younghusband, and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for Liberty or Death, among other honors, and served as inaugural Dean of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University.