British writer Patrick French has recovered some of V S Naipaul's early works that were thought to have been lost.

Naipaul and his wife Nadira have authorised French to write the Nobel Laureate's biography. 

Soon after he arrived in Britain from Trinidad in 1950, Naipaul deposited four short stories, a radio play and a poem in a London warehouse, which were later burnt down.

French, author of Liberty or Death and other works about the subcontinent, says of the manuscripts, 'Although this destruction may not match the burning of the library in Alexandria in its importance, it was a substantial literary loss.'

Using his talents as an historical investigator, French applied to the BBC to see if copies of the manuscripts might have been preserved in the archives.

'I knew as an undergraduate he had been writing fiction for Caribbean Voices, a radio programme on the BBC Colonial Service,' French wrote in this week's issue of The Sunday Times's Culture magazine.

'Using the reference numbers on the booking forms in his file in the BBC archives in Caversham, I managed to locate his "lost" oeuvre.'

'Preserved on grainy microfilm are four short stories, a radio play and the only poem he has ever written, broadcast from London to the West Indies just after his 18th birthday.'

The poem is entitled Two Thirty AM, the radio play is called B Wordsworth and the short stories are This is Home, Potatoes, Old Man and A Family Union.

'It is baffling that nobody has found this material before,' says French.'Naipaul's early work for the BBC is well known and he has had a global reputation as a novelist for decades. Countless academic books and impenetrable doctoral theses have been written about him. Universities teach courses which deconstruct his position in the pantheon of post colonial literature. Yet no academic has thought to spare a day for his early fiction in the bowels of the BBC.'

'Although these stories lack the technical skill of Naipaul's early novels, they offer a crucial bridge in our understanding of his development as a writer.'