Shiva Naipaul

Shivadhar Srinivasa Naipaul

London

1964–85

Shiva Naipaul, youngest brother of novelist and broadcaster V. S. Naipaul, was a journalist and writer. Educated at Queen’s Royal College and St Mary’s College, Trinidad, he arrived in Britain in 1964 to study Chinese at Oxford University. During his studies, he met his future wife, Jenny Stuart. In 1970 he published his first novel, Fireflies, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Winfred Holtby Memorial Prize, and he published The Chip-Chip Gatherers in 1973. In 1978 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Naipaul was also an accomplished journalist and writer of non-fiction works, including North of South (1978) and the travelogue Black & White (1980), recounting his journey to Guatemala and chronicling the Jonestown massacre. In 1983 he published a further novel, A Hot Country. Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth: Stories and Pieces (1984) was to be his final book. A collection of short fiction, memoirs and journalism, it is a detailed account of his childhood in Trinidad and his experience of prejudice in 1960s Britain and an account of the hostilities faced by Ugandan Asians who had to make a new home in Britain in the 1970s.

He died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1985, aged 40. The Spectator magazine inaugurated the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in his memory. His literary archive can be accessed at the British Library.