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.

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 in 1964, 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.

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).

On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. In an essay V. S. Naipaul wrote for The New Yorker, published in 2019, his older brother reports that he was not 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".

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). An early review by John G. Moss was critical of Naipaul's debut, saying:

There is light without heat. Nowhere does the novel burn with creative energy, yet its uninspired competence is occasionally illuminating. Each fluttering of light is independent of the others and, overshadowed by its context, is extinguished by too much captivity before the reader's eye. Unlike the ones in the story which light up the way, these fireflies have not been collected in a glass jar to die together. They move sporadically, without the discipline of confinement, commanding just enough attention to remind the reader of how dull they actually are.

In 1985, Anglo-Nigerian scholar and writer Adewale Maja-Pearce said that the Naipaul brothers' portrayals of Africa were overly informed by their "slavish worship of an alien tradition which they have adopted wholesale and which they use to measure everything that falls outside it". 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:

Shiva Naipaul's extensive reliance on the existing pre- and colonial-time archive of writing on Africa seriously undermines his representation of life in postcolonial East Africa. The result is a travelogue filled with a great sense of personal disappointment with the political, cultural, economic and social conditions in postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia – the countries that he visits. Shiva seems to unwittingly translate this sense of deep disappointment into a 'demonisation' of Eastern Africa.