No More Great Writers?

Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers ...

so said Sir V.S. Naipaul at the Hay festival.

Does he include himself in that analysis, I wonder?

Postscript (2/6/08) :

It really is hate Naipaul season! St. Lucia poet Derek Walcott has :

... reignited a simmering row with VS Naipaul by unveiling a stinging attack on the author - in verse. ...

according to Daniel Trilling in The Guardian. You can read an extract from The Mongoose here.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott