Writing about ‘the dark side of life’: from strippers in Soho to soldiers in Hamburg, Nina discusses bisexuality, feminism and sex work in a new interview with For Book’s Sake who crown the author ‘Brighton’s fabulous queen of the gutter’.
Interview with Mouth London
‘Strip clubs are often in the news; whether that’s the issue around licensing laws, new evidence on how clubs may effect the communities they are set in or documentaries exploring strip culture. But how often do we hear from the dancers themselves?’
Mouth London talk to Nina about writing her second novel Layla – the story of a young lap dancer.
Interview with Brighton Writers Retreat
‘How long did it take me to write my first novel? From its first incarnation as a series of letters to its final draft before publication, I’d say five years. What’s encouraging is that the unpublishable drivel of those letters somehow transmogrified over time into something that readers, real live readers, are picking up in bookshops.’
Read Nina’s interview, How to procrastinate, for local writing group Brighton Writers Retreat and learn just what it is that gets in the way of her writing.
Interview with i-studentglobal
‘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’).
Interview with Bookgroup Info
‘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 full interview with Bookgroup Info, in which she talks about the influences behind writing her debut novel, 4 a.m.
Nina de la Mer
Nina de la Mer is a Scottish novelist who lives and works in Brighton. After studying modern languages at the University of Sussex, de la Mer worked for ten years in book publishing before she began writing fiction herself.
Shortlisted for the 2010 Writer’s Retreat Competition and warmly and widely reviewed, her debut novel, 4 a.m., was published in 2011 by Myriad. In 2012, de la Mer was awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts to write her second novel. Layla was published in February 2014 and saw de la Mer’s work compared to that of James Kelman and Alan Bissett, who declared Nina ‘a vital British novelist’. Between her day job as an e-learning script writer and the practical demands of looking after her two young children, de la Mer is currently writing a third novel, The Decadents, an ensemble piece about two very different Brighton families.
An enthusiastic and committed writer, de la Mer regularly appears at salons such as Grit Lit and Ace Stories, has contributed original short stories to spoken word events and has helped judge several writing competitions. Her work has been covered in the press in outlets as varied as the Guardian, Hello! Magazine, The Daily Record and The Herald, whose reviewer remarked of her debut: ‘It’s about time we had a female Irvine Welsh.’
Interview with Strange Alliances
It was like attempting to build a ‘metaphorical onion’… Nina talks about monologues and observing people, places and emotions while writing 4 a.m., in an interview for the Strange Alliances blog.
Interview with brap.fm
‘The novel was based on a personal story… I went to Germany in my year abroad, studying languages. I was a real indie kid at the time. I wasn’t innocent but I turned my nose up at the whole electronic music thing.’
Discover the challenges Nina faced writing about raving, drugs & squaddies in her novel 4 a.m., in an interview for brap.fm.
Interview with John Niven for We Love This Book
‘A wee dram of wit’: Novelists John Niven and Nina de la Mer grew up a stone’s throw from each other in North Ayrshire in the 1970s. In this interview with We Love This Book they discuss humour, slang, and controversy in their novels.