Nina de la Mer was born in East Kilbride, Scotland and studied Modern Languages at the University of Sussex. She still lives in Brighton with her husband and daughter, but has also lived for short spells in London, Brussels, Paris and Hamburg.
She spent ten years selling translation rights for a variety of non-fiction and children’s book publishers. During her years as a rights sales person, Nina was inspired to write. Her first book, The Modern Maiden’s Handbook (Portico Books, 2007), is a humorous take on the women’s self-help formula. In the Foreword, author and journalist Julie Burchill said the book ‘in the sparkiest, sparkliest prose possible posits the notion that the only thing wrong with modern life is too little feminism rather than too much.’ Nina has written several non-fiction books under the pseudonym Gina McKinnon, her latest publication being 500 Essential Cult Books (The Ilex Press, 2010).
Fiction has always been Nina’s passion and she has been working on her debut novel, 4am, for several years. Being short-listed for the Myriad-West Dean Writers' Retreat Competition in 2009 spurred her on to complete it, and was the book’s route to publication by Myriad.
As a day job Nina proofreads E-Learning packages. She is currently working on a second novel.
'In the early 1990s I was a student in Hamburg, where I met British soldiers on the rave scene who were struggling to balance military life with their weekends spent clubbing – their lives were the inspiration for a story which I felt simply too good not to be told...' Read Nina's interview with Bookgroup.info.
