She would follow her debut novel with the 2007 published “The Post-Birthday World” that garnered just as much critical acclaim. Reviewers have asserted that while many fictional authors have tried to write about mass shootings no one does it better than Shriver. After more than 30 rejections and a new agent later, a small publisher agreed to publish the work which went on to win several awards. His mother is left reeling and has to confront the monstrous act committed by her son and carries a sense of guilt.Įven though she had an agent at the time he refused to find a publisher and she was forced to try to sell it on her own. Since then, she has become quite a popular author, selling thousands of copies of her works on both sides of the Atlantic.Īs a journalist, she has written for the likes of “The Guardian,” the “Wallstreet Journal,” the “Philadelphia Enquirer,” and “The Economist.”Įven though many of her earlier works garnered critical acclaim, she sold too few and as such was forced to continue earning a living as a journalist.īut things would change when in 2003 she published “We Need To Talk About Kevin” her seminal work in which a high school student kills his classmates in the now classic school shooting. “The Female of the Species,” her debut novel, was published in 1986 when she was twenty nine years old. Over the years, she has lived all over the world from Bangkok, Nairobi London and as a journalist in Belfast reporting on the Troubles. Shriver attended Columbia University in her teenage years and later on earned an MFA from the same institution. She thought the name Margaret Ann had all those connotations and that her family would expect something similar from her. She was born Margaret Ann Shriver but at the age of 15, she took up the name Lionel as she no longer wanted to associate herself with the pink ribbon girl that would get married to her high school sweetheart and end up as a housewife. Lionel Shriver is an author and journalist from North Carolina in the United States.

Kevin lionel shriver