Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty was born in 1966 in Sydney, Australia, the third of six siblings in a large storytelling family. Her sisters Jaclyn and Nicola are also published authors. Moriarty studied at Macquarie University, graduating with a degree in English literature, and worked for many years in advertising as a copywriter before turning seriously to fiction in her thirties. Her debut novel, Three Wishes, was published in Australia in 2003.
Moriarty established herself over her first several novels as a writer of warmly observed domestic comedy. Her career shifted with The Husband’s Secret (2013), a darker structurally ambitious novel about the consequences of a wife discovering a letter her husband has instructed her never to open, which became an international bestseller. Big Little Lies (2014) cemented her reputation. The novel unfolds backwards from a death at a school trivia night, weaving together the stories of three women whose friendships, marriages, and secrets are slowly illuminated. Its examination of domestic violence, female friendship, and the social performance of motherhood won the Davitt Award and the Australian Book Industry Award and sold millions of copies worldwide.
The HBO miniseries adaptation of Big Little Lies (2017), starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley, won eight Emmy Awards, bringing Moriarty’s work to a vast global audience. Her subsequent novels Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) and Apples Never Fall (2021) were also adapted for streaming, confirming her status as one of the most consistently adapted literary novelists of the streaming era.
Moriarty’s prose is characterised by an expert management of tone: she pivots from comedy to anguish within a single page without sacrificing credibility, and her novels render ordinary suburban life as simultaneously comic and fraught with menace. Her combination of entertainment and genuine social insight has made her one of the most beloved authors in the English-speaking world. She lives in Sydney and is widely regarded as Australia’s most commercially successful literary novelist.
