Lionel Shriver

In June 2018 she criticised an effort by the publisher Penguin Random House to diversify the authors that it published and better represent the population, saying that it prioritised diversity over quality and that a manuscript "written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven" would be published "whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling". This received criticism from Penguin Random House marketer and author Candice Carty-Williams. As a result of her comments Shriver was dropped from judging a competition for the magazine Mslexia.

Two-part interview conducted by Henk de Berg (2018).

Members of the moneyed Mandible family must contend with disappointment and struggle to survive, after the inheritance they had been counting on had turned 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. It 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.

As the 2016 keynote speaker at the Brisbane Writers' Festival, Shriver gave a controversial speech about cultural appropriation. Shriver had previously been criticized for her depiction of Latino and African-American characters in her book The Mandibles, which was described by one critic as racist and by another as politically misguided. In her Brisbane speech, Shriver contested these criticisms, arguing that accusations of racism and cultural appropriation were tantamount to censorship and that all writers ought to be entitled to write from any perspective, race, gender or background that they choose. The full text of her speech was published in the British newspaper The Guardian.

She is married to jazz drummer Jeff Williams. On June 7, 2016, Shriver appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme My Teenage Diary, during which she read extracts from her journals from the late 1960s and early '70s and discussed her upbringing and adolescence.

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

In an interview on Newsnight on BBC Two the night of 17 December 2012, she was questioned about the issue of whether the United States should change gun control laws after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and she said the opponents of gun control feel that it is a way for the individual to counterbalance the power of the state, which she thinks is a "fantasy" and an "absurdity".

The novel was adapted into the 2011 film of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton

Shriver's book So Much for That was released on March 2, 2010. In this novel, Shriver presents a biting criticism of the US health care system. It was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Her work The New Republic was published in 2012.

She expressed criticism of the American health system in an interview in May 2010 while at the Sydney Writers' Festival in Australia, in which she said she was "exasperated with the way that medical matters were run in my country" and considers that she is taking "my life in my hands. Most of all I take my bank account in my hands because if I take a wrong turn on my bike and get run over by a taxi, I could lose everything I have." She is a patron of UK population growth rate concern group Population Matters.

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.

We Need to Talk About Kevin was awarded the 2005 Orange Prize. The novel is a close 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:

Shriver has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist, contributed to the Radio Ulster program Talkback and many other publications. In July 2005, Shriver began writing a column for The Guardian, in which she has 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). She currently writes regularly for The Spectator.

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

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 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 male name more appropriate.