Background
Nkem Okotcha was born on October 26, 1977 and is the second of five children with three sisters and one brother immediately after her. She was born in Enugu and had majority of her education in the eastern part of Nigeria.
Nkem Okotcha was born on October 26, 1977 and is the second of five children with three sisters and one brother immediately after her. She was born in Enugu and had majority of her education in the eastern part of Nigeria.
She is the author of two romance novels, both of which rose to the top of Amazon.com bestseller lists for romanctic fiction within their first few months of being self-published. Her books have been described as showing that not only do Nigerians "fall in love and marry for love, also use love to conquer a wide range of situations that could have ordinarily been a bit difficult to shoulder alone." Her mother was a school teacher and her father worked for the National Electoral Commission, so her love of reading and education came from them and from the environment of Enugu, which is a part an academic and civil service city. Nkem attended Ekulu Primary School and junior secondary in Queens School, both in Enugu.
Foreign her senior secondary school, she transferred to the Loretto Special Science School before moving to the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Anambra to study Biological Sciences for her first degree.
Graduating in 2000, Nkem moved to Abuja where she lived and worked for several years, ending with a two years stint in a commercial bank before she left Nigeria in 2006 to study for a masters degree in Public Health Research at the University of Edinburgh. Nkem says she has "been a teacher, non-governmental organization consultant, banker, skate-hire attendant, and researcher and have worked for the government both in Nigeria and Scotland." Of her pseudonym, Nkem has said, "Myne Whitman is a name I coined myself when I began to write seriously while still in secondary school.
Most of the books I read were in English, and since I was writing in English too, I decided my name would be the same. So the pseudonym is a play on the transliterated words of my maiden name, Nkem Okotcha." In addition to her writing, Myne Whitman also runs Romance Meets Life, a lifestyle blog about relationships, parenting celebrity and entertainment.
The blog was originally started in 2009 as a way of promoting her novels, and it evolved into its current form over time, focusing mostly on matters of interest to Nigerian women.
Myne Whitman also manages Naija Stories, a site which hosts a community of readers and writers of stories of interest to Nigerians.