London:
After ending the famous 15-year feud with American writer Paul Theroux at the Hay Festival this week, Nobel laureate V S Naipaul has sparked off another row by claiming that there has been no woman writer whom he considers his equal.
Often described as the 'greatest living writer of English prose', Naipaul made the comments at the Royal Geographic Society yesterday, prompting angry responses from literary critics, writers and readers.
Not even the celebrated novelist Jane Austen came close to being equal to him, according to Naipaul.
The Writers Guild of Great Britain said it did not want to "waste its breath" on Naipaul's comments.
Asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match, he replied: "I don't think so."
On Austen, he said that he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".
He felt that women writers were "quite different", and added: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
Naipaul said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.