‘Work hard, finger-achingly hard. Make sure your work is absolutely perfect before submitting to agents and publishers, and, lastly, have something to say. No point working hard at the bare bones of your writing, if there is nothing of substance to flesh it out into something fully fledged and challenging for the reader.’

Read Nina’s interview with i-studentglobal where she talks about her experience of studying at Sussex University in the early 1990s (‘eye-opening’) and discusses the motivation levels needed to be a writer (‘olympian’).