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Shira Nayman (born April 26, 1960) is a novelist and short story writer best known for her collection Awake in the Dark, published in 2006. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

Nayman was born in South Africa and moved to Melbourne, Australia at a young age. There, she was raised in a community of mostly Holocaust survivors. She has said that this, along with her own family's escape from Eastern Europe during the pogroms of the early 20th century, has inspired her fiction.

Nayman graduated with honors from Melbourne's Monash University, with a Bachelor of Science 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 master's degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, in 1990.