A shocking biography of the Nobel laureate Sir V.S.Naipaul, which exposes his cruelty towards those closest to him, is tipped to win its author the richest prize in non-fiction writing.

Patrick French's The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul heads the shortlist for the 2008 Samuel Johnson prize, worth £30,000. The five other books include an investigation of a Victorian murder and a study of crows, but it is French's that is causing waves in literary circles, turning assumptions about official biographies on their head.

One reviewer has said of it: “Like it or not, this biography will change the way we read Naipaul's books, and for the worse.” Paul Theroux, who wrote his own wounding account of his relationship with Naipaul, said: “It is not a pretty story. It will probably destroy Naipaul's reputation for ever.”

French attributes his subject's willingness to bare all to a combination “of narcissism and humility”.

Naipaul's writing long ago earned him the status of a literary great: he is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker, and is an unflinching commentator on modern civilisation, from race, religion and culture to sex, through novels such as A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River. He has also cultivated a reputation for rudeness and arrogance, which French's book fleshes out into a monstrous portrait of a frighteningly self-obsessed man.

Naipaul's brutal treatment of his first wife, Pat, is particularly harrowing. He put her down constantly, consorted with prostitutes and had a 24-year-long, sexually violent affair with a woman from Argentina.

His wife was in remission from cancer when he admitted to The New Yorker in 1994 that he had been “a great prostitute man”. In French's book, he says: “I think that consumed her. She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her . . . I feel a little bit that way.”

His wife died in 1996 and the day after her cremation he welcomed into the marital home, not his long-suffering mistress, but a Pakistani journalist whom he had recently met. The pair married two months later.

French will be vying with Mark Cocker, whose book Crow Country grew out of his fascination with the birds that gathered in their thousands near his home, and Kate Summerscale, whose The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House examines a killing that inspired the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The other nominees are Tim Butcher, for Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart, which retraces H.M. Stanley's trip through Africa; Orlando Figes, for The Whisperers, a study of ordinary Russians under Stalin; and Alex Ross for The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a history of modern music from prewar Vienna to the Velvet Underground.

Sponsored by BBC Four, the prize is open to books in English on current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. Rosie Boycott, who is chairing the judging panel, said: “This superb list of books captures both the surface and the underbelly of human existence in all its myriad variations.

“All six books are ones which changed the way we looked at the world, they are all ones we are eager to pass on to others.”

Last year's prize was won by Rajiv Chandrasekaran for Imperial Life in the Emerald City. This year's winner will be announced on July 15.

THE BOOK ON THE LIKELY WINNER

5-2 The World is What It is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul Patrick French (Picador)

3-1 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)

4-1 The Whisperers Orlando Figes (Allen Lane) and Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart Tim Butcher (Vintage)

5-1 Crow Country Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)

6-1 The Rest is Noise Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)

Source: William Hill

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