Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes (born 1976) is a South African novelist, screenwriter, and former journalist. After a decade of freelance reporting, she turned to fiction with Moxyland (2008), a near-future thriller set in Cape Town, followed by Zoo City (2010), a genre-bending crime novel about a woman magically bonded to an animal familiar, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her subsequent novel The Shining Girls (2013) follows a time-traveling serial killer hunted across decades by one of his intended victims, and was adapted for television; it won The Strand Magazine's Critics Award for best novel. Beukes has also written the novels Broken Monsters and Afterland, contributed to DC's Vertigo comics line, and written for animated television. Her fiction mixes speculative premises with hardboiled crime plotting and a strong sense of place, often centered on South African settings.