LONDON: Nobel laureate and novelist VS Naipaul, famous for courting controversies, has done it again by lambasting literary greats from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens.

According to Naipaul, born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent, Henry James is “the worst writer in the world” and Thomas Hardy was “an unbearable writer” who “doesn’t know how to compose a paragraph”, reported BBC News. Ernest Hemingway “was so busy being an American” he “didn’t know where he was”, Naipaul told the Literary Review.

The writer was not happy with the reception his works get in Britain, his home since 1950s. “England has not apprec-iated or acknowledged the work I have done. En-glish writing is very much of England, for the people of England, and is not meant to travel too far.”

He criticises Dickens for his “repetitiveness”. Talking of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, he says: “I thought halfway through the book, ‘Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life .’”

Naipaul was more charitable towards HG Wells, Mark Twain and Harold Pinter.