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Nikki Gemmell (born 1966) is a best-selling Australian author. She resides in Sydney, Australia.

Career

Gemmell is the best-selling author of fourteen works of fiction and seven non-fiction books. Her books have been translated into 22 languages.^{[citation needed]}

Gemmell was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, and attended Kincoppal-Rose Bay, Sydney, on a scholarship. She graduated from the University of Technology Sydney with a Masters in Writing and worked as a radio journalist for ABC Radio and the BBC World Service.^[1]

Her distinctive writing style, including her use of the second-person narrative, has gained her critical and popular acclaim. In France she has been described as a "female Jack Kerouac".^[2] In 2007, the French literary magazine Lire included her in a list of what it called the fifty most important writers in the world – those it believed would have a significant influence on the literature of the 21st century.^[3]

Her best-known work is the 2003 novel The Bride Stripped Bare, an explicit exploration of female sexuality, which was originally written and published anonymously. Gemmell was identified publicly as the author of The Bride Stripped Bare before publication.^[4] The book went on to become a worldwide publishing sensation^[5] and the best-selling book by an Australian author in 2003.^[6] In the wake of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, it reentered the fiction charts in the UK in the summer of 2012. Two follow-up novels complete The Bride Stripped Bare trilogy: With My Body and I Take You. In 2022 The Bride Stripped Bare was named as one of the 25 best Australian novels of the past 25 years ^[7]

She has also published two series of books for children, the Kensington Reptilarium and Coco Banjo series.

Gemmell's weekly columns for The Weekend Australian newspaper won the 2022 Walkley award for commentary, analysis, opinion and critique.^[8]

In 2014 The Kensington Reptilarium was shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award in the category of Book of the Year for Older Children.^[9] In 1999 Cleave was shortlisted in the Fiction category of the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards.^[10] Four books by Gemmell, Shiver, Cleave, The Bride Stripped Bare and The Book of Rapture, made the longlist of "Favourite Australian Novels" as chosen by readers of the Australian Book Review.^[11]

Bibliography

Adult novels

Shiver (1997)
Cleave (1998); published as Alice Springs in the United States (1999)
Lovesong (2002)
The Bride Stripped Bare (2003)
The Book of Rapture (2009)
With My Body (2011)
I Take You (2013)
The Ripping Tree (2021)
Wing (2024)

For children

The Luna Laboratorium (2015)
The Icicle Illuminarium (2013)
The Kensington Reptilarium (2013)
Coco Banjo and the Super Wow Surprise (2016)
Coco Banjo Has Been Unfriended (2015)
Coco Banjo is Having a Yay Day (2015)

Non fiction

Why You Are Australian – A Letter to My Children (2009)
Pleasure: An Almanac of the Heart (2006), published as Plaisir : Un florilège du coeur in France (2011)
Honestly – Notes on Life (2012)
Personally – Further Notes on Life (2013)
After (2017; written in response to her mother's suicide)
On Quiet (2018)
Dissolve (2021)

Anthologies

Desire (Head of Zeus, 2016) Ed. Mariella Frostrup
Just Between Us: Australian Writers Tell The Truth About Female Friendship (Pan Macmillan Australia, 2013) Ed. Maya Linden, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, Natalie Kon-Yu, Miriam Sved
Better than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers (Lonely Planet, 2012) Ed. Don George
The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Red Dog Books, 2012) Ed. Rachel Power
Inside Notting Hill (Umbrella Books, 2007). Ed. Miranda Davies, Sarah Anderson
Some Girls Do ... My Life as a Teenager (Arena, 2006) Ed. Jacinta Tynan
Come Away With Me (Bantam, 2004) Ed. Sarah Macdonald
Writers on Writing (Penguin Books Australia, 2004). Ed. Roberts, Barry Mitchell, Roger Zubrinich
Australian Expats: Stories from Abroad (Global Exchange, 2003) Ed. Bryan Havenhand, Anne MacGregor
Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond (Bloomsbury UK, 2002). Ed. Jill Dawson, Margo Daly
Neverland: What Australia Might Have Been (Pluto Press, 2002). Ed. Kevin Murray
My One True Love (Random House Australia, 2000). Ed. Caro Llewellyn
Australian Summer Stories (Penguin Australia, 1999)
Partners (HarperCollins Australia, 1999). Ed. Ross Fitzgerald, Anne Henderson