Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver at Cannes, 2011
Born	Margaret Ann Shriver (1957-05-18) 18 May 1957 (age 59) Gastonia, North Carolina, US
Occupation	Journalist, novelist
Nationality	American
Spouse	Jeff Williams

Lionel Shriver (born May 18, 1957) is an American journalist and author who is resident in the United Kingdom. She is best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 and was adapted into the 2011 film of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton.

Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver on May 18, 1957, in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a deeply religious family (her father is a Presbyterian minister). At age 15, she informally changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given, and as a tomboy felt that a conventionally male name fitted her better.

Shriver was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University (BA, MFA). She has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast, and currently lives in London.

She is married to jazz drummer Jeff Williams. She also taught metalsmithing at Buck's Rock Performing and Creative Arts Camp in New Milford, Connecticut.

Shriver identifies as a libertarian.

Shriver wrote seven novels and published six (one novel could not find a publisher) before writing We Need to Talk About Kevin, which she called her "make or break" novel due to the years of "professional disappointment" and "virtual obscurity" preceding it. In an interview in Bomb magazine, Shriver listed her novels' subject matter up to the publication of We Need to Talk About Kevin as "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."