Born in North Carolina in 1957, Ms Shriver was educated at Columbia University in New York City. She published her first novel, The Female of the Species in 1986, and went on to publish seven more: Checker and the Derailleurs, Ordinary Decent Criminals, Game Control, A Perfectly Good Family, Double Fault, We Need to Talk About Kevin (winner of the 2005 Orange Prize), and The Post-Birthday World.

After spending her early adulthood in New York City, Ms Shriver has lived in Israel, Kenya, and Thailand, but has spent the bulk of her time in the UK. Based in Belfast beginning in 1987, she moved to London in 1999, where she remains today.

As an American expat in Britain, she has often written about American issues for a British audience, and British issues for Americans.  She has published in a host of newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is an occasional guest on Newsnight Review, and is the chief fiction reviewer at the Daily Telegraph.
 
Ms Shriver is married to jazz drummer Jeff Williams, and still spends summers in New York. Having thus spent the summer of 2008 in the US should, she hopes, make her “something short of clueless” about the American presidential election.