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Shiva Naipaul

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Shiva Naipaul
Born25 February 1945 Edit this on Wikidata
Died13 August 1985 Edit this on Wikidata (aged 40)
London Borough of Camden Edit this on Wikidata
LanguageEnglish language Edit this on Wikidata
Notable awardsGuggenheim Fellowship Edit this on Wikidata

Shiva Naipaul (/ˈnaɪpɔːl, naɪˈpɔːl/; 25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srinivasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was an Indo-Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist.

Life and work

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Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun.[1]

With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, Fireflies (1970), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Literature for best regional novel. It was followed by The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973). He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South (1978) and Black & White (1980), before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country (1983), a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces (1984).[1]

Death

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On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk.[1]

In an essay V. S. Naipaul wrote for The New Yorker, published in 2019, his older brother reports that he wasn't surprised at the time to hear about Shiva's death, that Shiva was a drinker, and that a year prior to his death (at a funeral for their younger sister that both had attended) V. S. describes having already seen "the look of death in his brother's face."[2]

Legacy and posthumous reputation

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The Spectator magazine, for which his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize.[3][4]

Writing for The Atlantic in 2008, Christopher Hitchens called his debut novel Fireflies "one of the great tragicomic novels of our day".[5]

In Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, a memoir of Shiva's elder brother, V. S. Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a "sot", shrunken by the towering figure of his successful brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Naipaul's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Sir Vidia's Shadow has come under attack for what are described as inaccuracies,[6] and the novelist Martin Amis wrote that "Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room ... in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius".[7][8]

An Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.[citation needed][9]

Shiva Naipaul's literary archive is held at the British Library. The collection (The Shiva Naipaul Archive) "consists of autograph and typescript drafts of Shiva Naipaul's fiction novels, non-fiction and travel writing. It also includes research and drafts relating to his articles, short stories and prose. There is a run of autograph notebooks, largely with notes and research gathered on his travels in India, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, Guyana, America, South Africa, Africa, and Australia. There is correspondence dating form his university days, with his family, his wife and a run of business correspondence."[10]

Works

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Novels

Nonfiction

Collections

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Sardonic Genius - Geoffrey Wheatcroft recalls his friendship with the writer Shiva Naipaul, who died 20 years ago", The Spectator, 13 August 2005.
  2. ^ Naipaul, V. S. (18 December 2019). "The Strangeness of Grief". The New Yorker. One morning, thirty years after the death of my father, my telephone rang. It was my brother's wife. I asked, in the common way of courtesy, "What news?" She said, "Bad news, I'm afraid. Shiva's dead." It did not surprise me. He was a drinking man, and I had seen death on his face the previous year, at the funeral of my younger sister. People there had talked about his worrying appearance. They had tried to get him to see a doctor (there were two in the family), but he had always refused. The appearance of impending death was more noticeable on him in a television appearance a few days later—so noticeable, in fact, I wondered whether the television people had not been worried by it.
  3. ^ Tan, Clarissa. "The Spectator's Shiva Naipaul prize for outstanding travel writing is open for entries". The Spectator. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
  4. ^ "Shiva naipaul memorial prize". The Spectator. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
  5. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (2015). And Yet... Essays. London: Atlantic Books. p. 224. ISBN 9781782394587.
  6. ^ Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul: Naipaul's friendship with Paul Theroux[dead link‍], The Daily Telegraph.
  7. ^ Martin Amis, New Statesman, April 1973, "Black and White" by Shiva Naipaul, reprinted in The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000.
  8. ^ Matthew Craft, "A Critical Take On Cliche", Hartford Courant, 16 November 2001.
  9. ^ "Arena: The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul" (Adobe Flash). BBC iPlayer.[dead link‍]
  10. ^ "The British Library, Western Manuscripts". The British Library. Retrieved 15 January 2020.
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