Lionel Shriver is the author of 12 books. Perhaps most famously "We Need To Talk About Kevin", for which he won the Orange Prize. Born Margaret Ann in May 1957, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager, she announced to her family that she would change her name to Lionel. A year later, she announced she would no longer be attending church with them. It has been said she writes mostly about characters who are hard to love. A series of what-if scenarios play out on her pages, troubling, confronting, often uncomfortable. "It makes me happy", she has said, "if I'm being successfully frightening." Dividing her time between New York and London, she's fiercely anti-authoritarian, a self-described Libertarian, pro-Brexit, anti-death, and it seems she doesn't have much time for the watercress and wasabi set who now populate our fast gentrifying inner-city suburbs. 

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