Eileen Merriman

Eileen Merriman is an award-winning New Zealand author of 14 novels for teen and adult audiences. Her intense and boundary-pushing books range from slow-burn thriller to dystopian science fiction to gripping medical drama, and have been variously published in the UK, Germany and Turkey as well as optioned for film and television.

Her debut YA novel, Pieces of You, was published in 2017 to much critical praise. The NZ Herald described it as ‘so compulsively readable it's hard to believe this is [Merriman’s] first published novel’ and poet and reviewer Paula Green wrote that it was ‘the kind of book you want to read in one sitting because it is so breathtakingly good…that will stay at the front of my mind all week and longer’. It was awarded a Storylines Notable Young Adult Book award and was a finalist in the Young Adult Fiction category of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Nine more novels for young adults followed in quick succession, ranging from contemporary realism to a science fiction trilogy and a spinoff series, and these cemented Merriman as ‘an author to watch out for’. They featured in the Storylines Notable YA Books lists and Merriman was a regular finalist in the young adult fiction category of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. A Trio of Sophies was also a finalist in the teen category of the Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime fiction in 2021.

In 2024, after several shortlistings, Merriman’s Catch a Falling Star won the New Zealand Book Awards Young Adult Fiction Award and NZ Booklovers Best Young Adult Book. A standalone novel exploring the backstory of a character from Catch Me When You Fall (2018), depicting the 15-year-old’s rapid spiral into a mental health crisis, the judges praised it as a ‘remarkably authentic portrayal…superbly written and frenetically paced’.

Merriman’s four works for adult audiences are populated with university students and young professionals and have been described as straddling a ‘new adult’ audience. Moonlight Sonata (2019), a deft exploration of a taboo relationship and intergenerational legacy, was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Literary journal Landfall noted the author’s ‘gift for character drawing and, even more, for landscape painting. What seems “utterly real” is, of course, a very clever web of fabrication that draws us into conundrums we might never have been asked to contemplate’. The Weekend Herald praised Merriman’s skilful crafting and propulsive narrative – so much so that ‘only the most disciplined of readers will put the book down and turn the light off at a sensible time of night.’

For the Silence of Snow (2020), Merriman drew on her extensive medical background (she works as a consultant haematologist at Auckland’s North Shore Hospital) to write an ethical drama about addiction in the medical world. ‘Merriman is an instinctive storyteller with an innate sense of timing’ wrote Nicky Pelligrino for Newsroom. ‘There's a misconception that if a novel is easy to read then it must have been easy to write. If anything the opposite is true…paring a story to the essentials – an engaging plot, authentic characters, a world that comes alive – takes real craft.’ The Spinoff’s Catherine Woulfe declared that she ‘could pick Eileen Merriman’s writing anywhere…a particular minor key that rings across each page, clear and sharp and quick’.

Her third novel for adults, Double Helix, was hailed by Newsroom’s Steve Braunias as ‘one of the 10 best novels of 2021…a love story and a tearjerker and a blazingly topical examination into assisted dying’, while The Night She Fell (2024) was a return to psychological suspense – ‘Everyone is talking about this book’ said Pip Adam in RNZ’s Book Critic and Patricia Bell wrote, ‘I literally couldn’t put the book down…a big tick for Merriman from me. She joins the high-calibre group of established and emerging crime and thriller writers in Aotearoa.’

Merriman lives in Auckland with her school-aged children and husband.