Bio
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” for her to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative power-brokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards.
In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007), Hild (2013), and So Lucky (2018). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original short fiction. Her multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition. Her essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. She’s won the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, Lambda Literary Award (six times), and others.
In 2015 Nicola founded the Literary Prize Data working group whose purpose initially was to assemble data on literary prizes in order to get a picture of how gender bias operates within the trade publishing ecosystem. (The $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize was established as a direct result.) The group’s interests have now grown to encompass other aspects of publishing and bias, though it is currently on hiatus. In 2016 she began #CripLit, an online community for writers with disabilities for which, with Alice Wong, she co-hosts a regular Twitter chat.
Nicola, now a dual US/UK citizen, holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, is married to writer Kelley Eskridge, and lives in Seattle. Most of the time she is happily lost in the seventh century (writing the second novel about Hild, Menewood), emerging occasionally to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.
Writer’s Manifesto
Something I wrote years ago that is still true today: “I will run my software on your hardware…” Read my Writer’s Manifesto here (some of the language is NSFW).
Signed, Personalised Books
Here’s how to get signed, personalised copies of my books from Phinney Books, our local Seattle independent.
Some interviews
Paris Review Daily
“Hild is an intricately plotted historical epic, set in a landscape that seems familiar and a culture that is anything but. Hild, the young protagonist, acts as an adviser to the king, Edwin, and the novel abounds with plotting, misdirection, and the use of mysticism toward decidedly realpolitik ends. Griffith’s ability to evoke a different time and place has manifested itself in very different ways over the years; her first two novels, Ammonite and Slow River, were both science fiction, though of very different types. Ammonite begins as anthropological science fiction and gradually becomes more epic in scale; Slow River involves conspiracies, industry, and a marvelously intricate plot. The series of three novels featuring Aud Torvingen—The Blue Place, Stay, and Always—are set in the modern world, with a fiercely analytical (and sometimes critically violent) protagonist. And in 2007, her memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, was released.”
Moss: In conversation with Alexis M Smith
“[It Books] make me impatient because they don’t engage in anything meaningful in a wider context. The big wide world and the people in it matters. Really, who apart from you gives a shit about the ethics of you having an adulterous affair? Or your inner conflict over whether or not you should feel bad about not having a baby? Or whether your dinner party will turn out well enough to be discussed positively in your social circle? No one will die one way or another. The world won’t change. You probably won’t even lose your job or home. It feels pointless. That kind of insipidity makes me want to reach into the book to, say, the privileged, self-absorbed drugged-up deliberately somnambulistic protagonist, pour cold water on her as she wallows in her own high-thread-count existential misery, and yell, Grow the fuck up!”
YouTube: Audience Q&A
I had the best time when Hild first came out, doing readings and giving interviews all over the country. But I began in Seattle, at Hugo House. Here’s 30 mins of the Q&A on that first night…
NPR (radio): To the Best of Our Knowledge
12-minute radio interview, from To the Best of Our Knowledge, in which I talk about writing Hild.
PBS (tv): Well Read
A great PBS show in which I chat back and forth with host Terry Tazzioli about Hild for about 15 minutes, and then Terry and critic Mary Ann Gwinn talk about the book, suggesting similiar novels to read, and more.
Conversation between Nicola and Sean McDonald, editor
“Sean McDonald: So, 7th-century England! How did that happen? Your last novel was a distinctly 21st-century crime novel. How did you end up writing Hild?
Nicola Griffith: In my early twenties I was living in Hull, a depressed (and depressing) industrialised city in East Yorkshire. For a break, for my sanity, I went north up the coast, to Whitby. / The first thing I saw was the ruined abbey on the East Cliff. I didn’t even stop to unload my backpack before climbing the one hundred and ninety-nine steps…”
Seattle Review of Books
“Nicola Griffith, best-known as the local author of Hild, published an astonishing blog post in late May of this year. Titled “Books about women don’t win big awards: some data,” Griffith presented a number of striking charts demonstrating the gender split between winners of awards like the Pulitzer Prize, the Man Booker, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Medal over the last 15 years. Unsurprisingly, more men than women have won almost all of those awards. But then Griffith noted an especially interesting statistic: the women who do win awards tend to win for books about male main characters. The post went viral. One week later, Griffith asked other people to take up her charge, to help count women’s voices in literature.
Last week, Griffith spoke with the Seattle Review of Books about her findings, the status of the project, and what all this damning data means for the state of the publishing industry.)”
Portfolio
I’ve started a portfolio at Muckrack which I’ll add to gradually.
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