Mary Renault (born Eileen Mary Challans, 4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983) was an English writer.

Renault received an undergraduate degree in English from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1928. She then trained as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she met her lifelong partner, the nurse Julie Mullard. Renault worked as a nurse until 1945. In 1948, she and her partner emigrated to South Africa, where Renaut lived until her death.

Books

• Purposes of Love (US title: Promise of Love) (1939)
• Kind Are Her Answers (1940)
• The Friendly Young Ladies (US title: The Middle Mist) (1944)
• Return to Night (1947)
• The North Face (1948)
• The Charioteer (1953)
• The Last of the Wine (1956) 
• The King Must Die (1958)
• The Bull from the Sea (1962)
• The Mask of Apollo (1966)
• Fire from Heaven (1969)
• The Persian Boy (1972)
• The Praise Singer (1978)
• Funeral Games (1981)

Non-fiction

• The Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae (1964)
• The Nature of Alexander (1975)

Books about her

• Mary Renault: a biography, by David Sweetman  (1993)
• The masks of Mary Renault: a literary biography, by Caroline Zilboorg (2001)