Shira Nayman :: Awake in the Dark

Welcome to my Website

Shira Nayman was born in South Africa, moved with her family to Australia as a small child, and was raised in Melbourne. She has lived in Israel and in Mexico, and spent many summers living in various countries (Spain, Holland, Germany, Australia), but makes her home in Brooklyn, New York.

Nayman graduated with honors from Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, with a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology and psychology, and spent a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem studying literature and history. Nayman then moved to the United States where she received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Rutgers University. After completing a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in psychology at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center in Westchester, she received a merit scholarship to study English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, earning her masters degree in 1990. She is the recipient of two grants from The Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board, the latest awarded for the 2005-6 cycle.

Nayman has published fiction and non-fiction in a variety of literary journals and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, The Georgia Review, The New England Review, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Boulevard, and Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. Her first book, “Awake in the Dark,” written while Ms. Nayman was living with her family in Mexico, was published by Scribner in October, 2006. The paperback edition of “Awake in the Dark” is scheduled for release in September, 2007.

Nayman is currently working on a novel, also under contract with Scribner, which is set in a psychiatric hospital in the 1940’s and 1950’s, which is due out some time in 2008. She has a variety of other projects underway, including a novel for the Young Adult audience, titled “River,” which is about a young girl’s journey to discover her true self; a novel set during and after World War II in three different countries; and two further collections of short stories also set against a backdrop of the Holocaust.

Shira Nayman has taught in the psychology department at Rutgers University and in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. While writing fiction over the past fifteen years, Nayman has also built a career as a marketing consultant, working with Fortune 100 companies and national political campaigns to develop positioning strategy for major brands, product launches, and political candidates. Her clients have included Hershey, Microsoft, AOL, Citibank on the corporate side, and The Center for National Policy and Hilary Clinton’s senate campaign in the political sphere. She is currently devoting herself full-time to fiction writing.