Shira Nayman was born in South Africa. At a young age, her family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she was raised in a community of mostly Holocaust survivors. This, plus her family's own escape from Eastern Europe during the pogroms of the early 20th century, would inspire her fiction.

Nayman graduated with honors from Melbourne's Monash University, with a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology and psychology. After graduating, she spent a year studying literature and history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before moving 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, Nayman earned her masters degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, in 1990.

Nayman has published two books of fiction, Awake in the Dark (2006) and The Listener (2009), and many pieces of fiction and nonfiction in publications such as The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The New England Review, and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought.

Nayman has taught psychology at Rutgers University, literature at Columbia University, is teaching in the Program of Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University Medical School, and she will also begin teaching Advanced Fiction writing at Barnard College in 2011.

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 senate campaign.

Awake in the Dark was published in 2006 by Scribner. A collection of short stories that portray the contemporary lives of the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators as they struggle with the legacy of their parents -- their questions of identity, family, and faith. Awake in the Dark was named a best book of the year by a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Newsday.

The Listener was published in 2009 by Scribner. A novel explores the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche, and illuminates the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity. Set in a New York sanitorium, The Listener plays on the relationship between a doctor and patient struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Listener was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as an "Editor's Choice."

Shira Nayman has received three year-long grants for fiction writing from the Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board (2002, 2005, 2009). She is also the recipient of the Cape Branch Award for an Emerging Woman Writer (2011).