Shira Nayman

The Listener Nayman followed up the success of Awake in the Dark with a debut novel, The Listener, which was published by Scribner in 2009. 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," and elsewhere described as a "gripping narrative with style and depth." It was listed as an Editors Choice in The New York Times.

A Mind of Winter

Her second novel, A Mind of Winter, was published by Akashic Books in 2012. This time coming at the Second World War by way of Shanghai, London, and Long Island, A Mind of Winter is a psychological thriller that once again asks how war can shape identity and experience. Named one of Library Journals "Best 2012 Indie Novels," A Mind of Winter was well received by critics, praised for having "the beauty and elegance of a Victorian novel," and for "tak[ing] the reader on a journey into the abyss of human experience."

River

River, a crossover adult/young adult novel, was published in April 2020 by Guernica Editions.

Shoreline Shoreline (2024) is a nontraditional, creative memoir taking up the theme of intergenerational wandering and dislocation.

Other publications

Nayman has also published fiction and nonfiction in publications such as The Atlantic, Cousin Corinne's, The Georgia Review, The New England Review, and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. A short story commissioned by NPR, "Moon Landing," was broadcast in December 2010, and was chosen as one of eight stories to appear in the "Best of Hanukkah Lights" broadcast. Two chapter excerpts from Nayman's new book, Shoreline, were published in Tablet Magazine (November, 2020, and June, 2021). Another excerpt, Moon Landing, was published in Tikkun Magazine in 2021.

Teaching and consulting

Nayman has taught psychology at Rutgers University, literature at Columbia University, and fiction writing at Barnard College. She has also taught in the Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

After 23 years with Strategic Frameworking, Inc., Nayman founded her own company, Shira Nayman Consulting, in 2012. She specializes in in-depth psychological research as well as children's and women's issues.

Personal life She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Highland Park, New Jersey, with her husband, the psychologist and writer, Louis Sass. They have a son and a daughter together. She became a US citizen having lived there for 27 years. She was born a citizen of South Africa, before becoming an Australian citizen.

Recognition and awards 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).

Nayman was a 2019 MacDowell Fellow.