Shiva Naipaul did not receive much positive acclaim from reviewers in his lifetime, although he won the
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for best regional novel from the Royal Society of Literature for
Fireflies (1970). In 2004, Kenyan literature scholar Tom Odhiambo made a similar critique, saying Shiva Naipaul's portrayal of
East Africa in
North of South: An African Journey suffered from its over-reliance on existing Western accounts (a "biased archive") of the wider continent. He writes: Following Naipaul's death, some reviewers became more accepting of his work. In 2003, Mohamed Bakari, comparing him to his older brother Vidia, described Naipaul as "equally gifted". In 2005, his friend and colleague
Geoffrey Wheatcroft said he wrote "splendid journalism", even though he hated being a journalist. That same year,
Paul Theroux published ''Sir Vidia's Shadow'', a memoir of Shiva's elder brother, V. S. Naipaul. In it, Theroux takes issue with the younger Naipaul's literary skills, particularly as a
travel writer. In 2009, scholar S. Walter Perera said Naipaul's
An Unfinished Journey was "a palpable example of traditional travel writing", but criticises Naipaul's "critical rigor" and "First or Second World perspective". In 2018, C. Darius Stonebanks said Naipaul's work has value for its consideration of the experiences and
positionality of
brownness as a racial category, especially in the chapter "Between Master and Slave" in
North of South. He concludes: In 2020, Bénédicte Ledent writes of Naipaul's attempts to "come to a personal understanding of other peoples, and eventually of himself" in his travel writing. Ledent says that ultimately: In 2024, George Cochrane suggested in
The Critic that Naipaul had been "unjustly overlooked". He commends Naipaul's "immaculate prose style" and says "Living in Earl's Court" is "an important work of Windrush literature and an interrogation of its author’s wanderlust". Cochrane also suggests that because the younger Naipaul son was raised primarily by his mother, after the death of his father
Seepersad Naipaul, his ability to write from the female perspective was "correspondingly strong", unlike his older brother's. At Naipaul's best, he says, his articles are "models of good journalism, full of vivid reportage, provocative opinion and a formidably assured grasp of the (very complex) issues". He further says that while Naipaul was critical of Africa, "there is no question of him defending
colonialism, as there is with Vidia". == Legacy ==