Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver (born Margaret Ann Shriver; May 18, 1957) is an American author and journalist who lives in the United Kingdom.

It was written in 1998, but failed to find a publisher at the time.

Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.

Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver, in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a religious family.

Her father, Donald, was a Presbyterian minister who became an academic and president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York; her mother was a homemaker.

At age 15, she changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given and, as a tomboy, felt a conventionally masculine name was more appropriate.

Shriver was educated at Barnard College of Columbia University (BA, MFA).

She has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast, and currently resides in London.

She has taught metalsmithing at Buck's Rock Performing and Creative Arts Camp in New Milford, Connecticut.

Shriver had written eight novels, of which seven had been published, before she wrote We Need to Talk About Kevin, which she called her "make or break" novel because of the years of "professional disappointment" and "virtual obscurity" preceding it.

In an interview with Bomb magazine, Shriver listed the various subjects of her novels up to the publication of We Need to Talk About Kevin: "anthropology and first love, rock-and-roll drumming and immigration, the Northern Irish Troubles, demography and epidemiology, inheritance, tennis and spousal competition, [and] terrorism and cults of personality".

Rather than writing traditionally sympathetic characters, Shriver prefers to create characters who are "hard to love."

We Need to Talk About Kevin was awarded the 2005 Orange Prize.

The novel is a study of maternal ambivalence, and the role it might have played in the title character's decision to murder nine people at his high school.

It provoked much controversy and achieved success through word of mouth.

She said this about We Need To Talk About Kevin becoming a success:

I'm often asked did something happen around the time I wrote Kevin.

Did I have some revelation or transforming event?

The truth is that Kevin is of a piece with my other work.

There's nothing special about Kevin.

The other books are good too.

It just tripped over an issue that was just ripe for exploration and by some miracle found its audience.

In July 2005, Shriver began writing a column for The Guardian, in which she shared her opinions on maternal disposition within Western society, the pettiness of British government authorities, and the importance of libraries (she plans to will whatever assets remain at her death to the Belfast Library Board, out of whose libraries she checked many books when she lived in Northern Ireland).

Shriver currently writes for The Spectator, and occasionally contributes to the "Comment" page of The Times, standing in while regular columnist Matthew Parris is away.

In a 2022 "Comment" article, she argued that "Putin could nuke Ukraine and get away with it".

In 2009, she donated the short story "Long Time, No See" to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors.

Her story was published in the Fire collection.

Shriver's book So Much for That was published on March 2, 2010.

In the novel, Shriver presents a biting criticism of the U.S. health care system.

It was named as a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction.

The novel was adapted into the 2011 film of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller.

Her work The New Republic was published in 2012.

Her 2013 book, Big Brother: A Novel, was inspired by the morbid obesity of one of her brothers.

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, published in May 2016, is set in a near-future in which the United States is unable to repay its national debt and Mexico has built a wall on its northern border to keep out US citizens trying to escape with their savings.

Members of the moneyed Mandible family must contend with disappointment and struggle to survive after the inheritance they had been counting on turns out to have turned to ash.

A sister bemoans a shortage of olive oil, while another has to absorb strays into her increasingly cramped household.

Her oddball teenage son Willing, an economics autodidact, looks as if he can save the once august family from the streets.

The novel was "not science fiction", Shriver told BBC Radio 4's Front Row on May 9, 2016.

It is an "acid satire" in which "everything bad that could happen ... has happened" according to the review in the Literary Review.

Shriver has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist, Harper's, and other publications, plus the Radio Ulster program Talkback.