Nikki Gemmell

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

Gemmell is the author of nine novels and four works of non-fiction. Her books have been translated into 22 languages.

Nikki was born in Wollongong, New South Wales and attended Kincoppal School, Sydney on a scholarship. She graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with a Masters in Writing. She has worked as a radio journalist for ABC Radio in Australia and as a producer for the BBC World Service.

She is known for her use of the second-person narrative. Her distinctive writing has gained her critical and popular acclaim in France. She has been described in France as a "female Jack Kerouac". 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.

Her best-known work is the 2003 novel The Bride Stripped Bare, an explicit exploration of female sexuality.

Originally written and published anonymously, Gemmell was identified publicly as the author of The Bride Stripped Bare before publication. The book went on to become a worldwide publishing sensation and the best-selling book by an Australian author in 2003. 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.

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

Gemmell appears regularly on the Nine Network's Today and pens a weekly column for The Australian newspaper.

In 2003 Gemmell also penned a weekly column for the Mail on Sunday in London which formed the basis of a compendium titled Pleasure: An Almanac for the Heart (2006).

In 2014 The Kensington Reptilarium was shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award in the category of Book of the Year for Older Children. In 1999 Cleave was shortlisted in the Fiction category of the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. 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.