Author Nikki Gemmell is part of the line-up for the South Coast Readers and Writers Festival. Photo: Stuie Spence.
Wollongong-born author Nikki Gemmell is returning to the region that sparked her love of literature and provided her first publishing break, joining a star-studded line-up at the South Coast Readers and Writers Festival in Thirroul this July.
Gemmell will be among names like Dictionary of Lost Words author Pip Williams, New York Times bestselling author Charlotte McConaghy, and Bitter Greens writer Kate Forsyth.
The now Sydney-based internationally acclaimed author, named one of the world’s 50 most important writers by French literary magazine Lire, will share insights into her writing about women, spanning memoir to thriller.
Her talk will discuss her latest thriller novel Wing, her 2017 memoir After, and the book that caused a scandal in 2003, bestseller The Bride Stripped Bare, which was originally published anonymously, only for her to later be found out.
“My latest book Wing is a literary thriller – kind of Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Lord of the Flies meets Promising Young Women,” she said.
She said Wing was inspired by having teenagers, specifically a teenage daughter.
“It’s about young women and the boys who surround them,” she said.
“It’s kind of my love letter to young Australian women.
“But also, I’m fascinated by the dynamics of the high school school yard, so it takes everything I’ve observed about womanhood and young women over the past couple of decades, really, since my book The Bride Stripped Bare.”
Two decades on from that book, it’s easy to see how life has changed – instead of the narrator being a young mother, she’s now a menopausal headmistress at an elite school where 10 girls go missing in the bush on a school camp.
Gemmell said she also wrote the memoir After about her mother who raised her in Keiraville, which also details her childhood in the region.
A proud Wollongong native, Gemmell credits her literary roots to Keiraville Public School, where her first poem was published in the school magazine.
“I feel immense gratitude to my Year 5 and Year 6 teacher at Keiraville Public, Fred Rice,” she said.
“He really instilled in me my love of literature.
“There was a fabulous school magazine at Keiraville Public called the Keiraville Kookaburra.
“When I was eight, I got my first poem published in it, and that really set me on the path.”
She said from that moment, she loved seeing her work published.
“He gave me the confidence to think I could actually be a writer, so I have a lot to thank Keiraville Public for,” she said.
Gemmell said that confidence was important for writers.
“Even though to the outside world you might appear to be a very successful writer, your confidence can still go up and down, as mine has my entire career,” she said.
“So I just feel very lucky to be able to make a full-time living out of writing.”
With her latest book being about teen girls, do her own kids read her books?
“They don’t read any of my books. My daughter says she can’t read me because it’s like having my voice in her head,” she said, laughing.
“The Saturday Paper did a quiz on the weekend of the election.
“It was, ‘Who’s written the novels Wing, Shiver and The Bride Stripped Bare?’, and I just put that on the fam chat.
“One of them came back with ‘no idea’, another one just went, ‘haha’ and the third went, ‘Enid Blyton?’”
Gemmell said she was looking forward to returning to Wollongong, which she visits as often as she can, always coming in via Sea Cliff Bridge and Lawrence Hargrave Drive to allow her to “remember it all”.
“Dad used to take me to Thirroul to see the wrestling with Mario Milano,” she said.
“So Thirroul and I go back a long way.”
As she talked, more memories were stirred up – her birthday party at the first McDonalds restaurant in the Illawarra, and her father being a lifesaver at Austinmer Beach.
“I love Wollongong dearly, and I still have fond memories of the fabulous bookstore, Coddingtons, which used to exist on Crown Street,” she said.
“It’s no longer there, but it was the first bookshop I ever went to, and I used to just love getting lost in its books.”
Other names announced for the festival are Isobelle Carmody, Lucy Nelson, Lauren Keegan, Camille Booker, Tim Flannery, Dr Debra Dank, Darren Rix, Ryan Butta and Helena Fox, along with a poetry reading showcase and two festival workshops.
Tickets for the South Coast Readers and Writers Festival at Thirroul from 5-6 July are now available, with early bird tickets on sale until 9 June.
