Nina was born in Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand to a first generation father whose Croatian parents migrated from the former Yugoslavia, and a Croatian mother who, while still a teenager, chose New Zealand as the “Amerika” of her dreams.

Since her first trip to Yugoslavia at the age of 11, Nina has been intrigued by the pull her parents’ ancestral homeland. As a young adult Nina gravitated to the written word, working in libraries and managing bookshops both in New Zealand and overseas. She fell in love with Venice and was awarded a year’s scholarship to study literature in the city of her dreams.

Nina’s enquiry into her ethnicity informs her academic work: her doctorate (University of Auckland 2000) is “My Two Countries Firmly Under My Feet”. She has been involved in several fiction films and  documentaries on Croatian identity—notably New Zealand, an Immigrant Nation: “Dalmatian at Heart”, and The Road Back.

After three decades of teaching at the University of Auckland and many academic publications, Nina now contracts herself to the institution while writing the stories of her family and her Croatian ancestry. She lectures both at home and in Croatia on the rich history of Dalmatian migration in literature.

Nina lives on five serene hectares north of Auckland with her architect husband Richard, and when not writing or lecturing you will find her in her extensive garden or swimming at the pristine nearby beach. In the New Zealand winter she returns to her great grandmother’s house on the island Hvar in the Adriatic where her mother lived as a child, planning her next project.