[citation needed] Gemmell was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, and attended Kincoppal-Rose Bay, Sydney, on a scholarship.
[2] 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.
[3] Her best-known work is the 2003 novel The Bride Stripped Bare, an explicit exploration of female sexuality, which was originally written and published anonymously.
[6] In the wake of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, it reentered the fiction charts in the UK in the summer of 2012.
Gemmell's weekly columns for The Weekend Australian newspaper won the 2022 Walkley award for commentary, analysis, opinion and critique.