Mania
Interview conducted by Kasmira Jefford, editor-in-chief of Geneva Solutions
LIONEL SHRIVER is an award-winning American novelist and journalist whose work has been translated into over twenty-five languages. Best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin (Il faut qu’on parle de Kevin, Belfond, 2006), winner of the 2005 Orange Prize and adapted to cinema in 2011 by Lynne Ramsay, she explores uncomfortable truths with sharp wit and fearless intelligence. Her bestseller The Post-Birthday World (À prendre ou à laisser, Belfond, 2023) examines how a onetime choice can alter an entire life.
In her latest novel, Mania (Hystérie collective, Belfond, 2026), she delivers a bleak but funny vision of a society where intellectual merit is heresy. Her fiction remains frighteningly plausible. Her journalism appears in key newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. She lives between Lisbon, London and Brooklyn.