Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, internationally best-selling novelist who also writes comics, screenplays, TV shows and journalism. Her novels, including The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters and Zoo City have been translated into 23 languages and developed for film and TV.

Beukes is a former journalist, who has covered HIV+ beauty pageants, ganglands cops and great white shark tourism. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her fiction has been described as high-concept and genre-blending, with a social conscience that examines the fracture points of society and who we are.

She’s won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the University of Johannesburg prize, the August Derleth Award for Best Horror, the Strand Critics Choice Award for Best Mystery Novel, the RT Thriller of the Year and the Mbokodo Award. Her work has been praised by Stephen King, George RR Martin, James Ellroy and Gillian Flynn as well as The New York Times, The Guardian and NPR. Her other published work includes the corporate dystopia, Moxyland, the non-fiction, Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past and a collection, Slipping, short stories, essays and other writing.

When she’s not on tour, or travelling for research, from Detroit to Zagreb, Muskat to Port-au-Prince, she lives in London with her daughter.