Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was educated at Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad and at University College, Oxford. He married in 1967 and had one son. His books include Fireflies (1970), which won the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Winifred Holtby Prize; North of South (1978), the story of his remarkable journey through Africa; Black and White (1980); A Hot Country (1983); and Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces (1984). Many of these are published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, as well as A Man of Mystery and Other Stories (1995), a selection of stories taken from Beyond the Dragon's Mouth. Shiva Naipaul died in 1985 aged only forty; David Holloway in the Daily Telegraph wrote, 'We have lost one of the most talented and wide-ranging writers of his generation.'