Shira Nayman (born April 26, 1960) is a South African, Australian and American novelist, short story writer and clinical psychologist.
Like most of her work, Awake in the Dark takes the Second World War as its subject matter, portraying the lives of children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators as they struggle with their parents' legacy.
Newsday named it one of the best books of 2006, writing, "The bleak, beautiful and deftly plotted stories [...] are like nothing out there, taking as their theme the collateral damage of Nazism, delivered in many cases with an O. Henry twist.”[9] Karen R. Long gave the book a glowing review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing that, in these stories, the Holocaust "is the smoldering demon that reaches across generations, scraping its talons into the interior lives of children and grandchildren who were, metaphorically and literally, left in the dark.
A psychological drama that takes place in a mental asylum in upstate New York in the aftermath of World War II, The Listener expanded on many of the themes she had investigated in her previous work by exploring the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche and illuminating the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity.
It was praised as "an honest look at the way trauma and violence afflict an entire generation's psyche,"[12] and elsewhere described as a "gripping narrative with style and depth.
Shoreline is a nontraditional, creative memoir taking up the theme of intergenerational wandering and dislocation, highlighting the resonant connections that wind through fractured but binding histories.
[23] In addition to her writing and teaching career, Nayman is a marketing consultant who has developed positioning strategy for major brands and product launches for such Fortune 100 companies as Microsoft, Hershey, AOL, and political campaigns, including the Center for National Policy and Hillary Clinton's United States Senate campaign.
[1] Nayman has received three-year-long grants for fiction writing from the Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board.
She is also the recipient of the Cape Branch Award for an Emerging Woman Writer (2011), and a fiction-writing grant from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (2011).