Australian American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Memoirist

Meet Shira

Born in South Africa, Shira Nayman grew up in Australia and lives in Brooklyn with her husband. She is a clinical psychologist, and has also worked as a marketing consultant.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Boulevard and Tablet Magazine. She is the author of five books: Awake in the Dark (Scribner, short stories), The Listener (Scriber, a novel), A Mind of Winter (Akashic Books, a novel), River (Guernica Editions, a novel) and Shoreline (Guernica Editions, a memoir). Awake in the Dark was nominated for the Dayton Peace Prize and has also been adapted for the stage. She has received three year-long grants from the Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board, and is a MacDowell Fellow.

About the Author

books by shira

SHORELINE

A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space.
-Kirkus review

"A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space."

Kirkus Starred Review

"This is a gripping memoir of an extraordinary life. It is written with all the vivid detail of a novel but given added resonance by the pressure of fact behind it. The author explores the notion of identity across four continents and through several generations. Shira Nayman reflects on these [key] issues unflinchingly and with penetrating insight..."

Charles Palliser, author of The Quincunx and Sufferance

"The sheer vibrancy of this book is nothing less than riveting. It is not just brilliant, but its work is deep and beautiful, and has lived in my mind from the first moment I dipped into it: so well written, so imaginative, so very ‘present’ – and so unnerving. A must-read.’"

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things

"Shoreline is such a touching and stimulating book, filled with haunting details and a lucid and penetrating vision. Superb and stunning."

David Mikics, author of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (Yale Jewish Lives)

Awake in the Dark

Bold and deeply affecting, Awake in the Dark is a provocative and haunting work of fiction about who we are and how we are formed by history.

The Listener

Set against the backdrop of the insanity of war, The Listener explores the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche, and illuminates the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity.

A Mind of Winter

A Mind of Winter is a complex, page-turning, literary psychological thriller, which takes up a rich array of themes: the ways in which we choose our beliefs and build our lives and the ways in which circumstances inevitably shape personal identity and destiny.

River

River is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who travels back in time, and across continents, encountering her maternal forbears when they were her age.

“I’m shaken by Shira Nayman’s brilliant and mystical stories."

Ursula Hegi

"There is breathtaking storytelling here, replete with psychological detail and stunning clarity."

Library Journal

“It is to Nayman’s great credit that her subtle handling of extremely dramatic material allows the reader to be deeply moved without feeling manipulated."

San Francisco Chronicle

“Nayman’s stories hauntingly and beautifully unveil the depths of her characters. Each story is full of twists and secrets, yet each has an openess that makes history immediate. "

Book Passage

Theatre Review

NYC production of Awake in the Dark

Based on Shira Nayman’s book with music by Ben Moore

This theater performance is based on Nayman’s widely praised book, Awake in the Dark. Though fictional, the story recalls various true-life memoirs of the war and the Holocaust. It vividly limns a small child’s point of view, and later her confusion of memory, as well as the lives of several adults living through monstrous times. It’s told through recollections narrated by Christiane and Hilde – and through some of the finest live incidental music I’ve ever heard in the theater.

Jon Sobel, Blogcritics.org