She graduated from Osaka Prefecture University and held an office job for four years while writing fiction.
[1] In 1999 she published her first short story, "Reddo, ierō, orenji, burū" ("Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue").
[3] In 2006 Shibasaki won a MEXT Award for New Artists for Sono machi no ima wa (Today, in that City), which was then nominated in 2007 for the Akutagawa Prize, but did not win.
[4] In 2010 she won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Nete mo samete mo, a first-person story about a woman who falls in love, loses her boyfriend, then meets a man who looks identical to her disappeared boyfriend but acts completely differently.
[8] The following year, an English translation of her Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Haru no niwa was published by Pushkin Press under the title Spring Garden.