Nicola Griffith

Writer. Queer cripple with a PhD. Seattle & Leeds.

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  • Image description: Black and white headshot of a smiling, short-haired white woman in three-quarter profile before a microphone. She looks very happy to be in front of an audience.

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About

Bio

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and counselling at a street drugs agency, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: she was the first openly queer person for whom the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” 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), So Lucky (2018), Spear (April 2022) and Menewood (2023). 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 and media outlets, including the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, Electric Lit, Literary Hub, and Out. She’s won the Washington State Book Award (twice), the Otherwise/Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, the 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.) In 2016 she began #CripLit, an online community for disabled writers for which, with Alice Wong, she co-hosts an occasional Twitter chat.

Nicola, now a dual US/UK citizen, holds a PhD 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 (researching her ongoing series about Hild), emerging occasionally to enjoy a ferocious bout of wheelchair boxing, drink just the right amount of beer, and take enormous delight in everything.


Writer’s Manifesto

When I write, dear reader, I don’t want to build a careful tale for you to discuss with a smile in a sunny place, I want to own you. I don’t want to be The New TV Series, I want to be pornography: to thrill you so hard you’re ashamed but can’t help yourself crawling back for more.

I want to write a whole novel that invades you. I want to control what you think and feel, to put you right there, right then, killing and being killed, fucking and being fucked, cooking and starving, drinking and thinking, barely surviving and absolutely thriving. I want to give you a life you’ve never had and change the one you live.

How? I will take control of your mirror neurons. I will give you tastes and textures, torments and terrain you might never find in your real life. I will take you, sweep you off your feet, own you. For a while. For a while when you’re lost in my book you will be somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

I control the horizontal, I control the vertical. Sit back, relax, enjoy. When you’re done, take a breath, smoke a cigarette, figure out who you are now, and come back for more.


Signed, Personalised Books

Here’s how to get signed, personalised copies of my books from Phinney Books, our local Seattle independent.


Some interviews

There are many more interviews linked to in individual book pages, for example Hild and So Lucky. These are a few I like this month. I’ll rotate them every now and again. Titles are the links.

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!”

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 similar novels to read, and more.

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.

https://nicolagriffith.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/ttbook-hild.mp3

Wordgathering
WG: With respect to So Lucky, what kinds of things do you think you were able to do in that book that as a novelist that you would not have been able to do as a memoirist?

NG: With So Lucky I wanted to explore how chronic illness and disability affects us—our decisions, our friends, our place in the world—without confusing that exploration with my specific personal experiences. I needed the clarity of fiction. Fiction allowed me to compress time and so intensify the experience for protagonist and reader. To build a narrative structure that helps the reader experience ableism, its internalisation, and eventual deconstruction. And, importantly, to make metaphor concrete.
So Lucky
takes place over the course of a single year. In that time, Mara learns about ableism what took me twenty years to learn. I make that possible by accelerating the course of Mara’s MS in order to lead her and the reader through an equally accelerated series of realisations. When we meet her, she is a woman on top of her world, who’s never met a challenge she couldn’t deal with—until, in the space of a single week, she’s diagnosed with MS, divorced by her wife, and loses her job. She then goes on to create a nonprofit, fall in love, and fight monsters, human and otherwise. So Lucky is a story about a woman with MS written by a woman with MS. The first word of the book is It, and It is a monster. But the monster is not MS, the monster is ableism…

Portfolio

I’ve started a portfolio at Muckrack which I’ll add to gradually.


Contact

For most things, please contact the relevant agent, listed here.

For everything else, email me via this form:


Privacy policy

This site runs on WordPress, a service of Automattic. Automattic’s Privacy Notice for Visitors to Our Users’ Sites lays out what data they harvest from visitors to nicolagriffith.com and how they use it.

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Blog

  • 2023: A Big Year - 2023 is a year of Big Anniversaries—those ending in 0 or 5—marking significant life events for me and Kelley. Here are a round dozen of them.
  • Self-portrait - A first-time self-portrait and some thoughts about the mysteries of Beginner's Luck
  • Suzy McKee Charnas - Suzy McKee Charnas died yesterday. Go read one of her books.
  • Spear—Award Eligibility - If you want to nominate SPEAR for an award (thank you!), here's what you need to know.
  • 2023! - 2023 is off to a shining start with felines, fish, feathers, flying frozen treats and fine Fran's chocolates.
  • 2022 Blog Stats - For the second year in a row the number of people visiting my blog increased—though not by much. Here are the Top 10 new posts and the Top 15 overall. Plus an explanation of why blogging beats newsletters.
  • Happy Hedgepig Disco Season to All! - Via Roisín Astell on Twitter (from Verdun bibliothèque municipale MS 107, f.8r)
  • Signed personalised books for the holidays—including my memoir! - I’m teaming up again with Phinney Books, on Greenwood Avenue, Seattle, to bring you signed, personalised books for the holidays. And, this year only, you can BUY A COPY OF MY SIGNED, NUMBERED MEMOIR-IN-A-BOX. I can't wait for you to read it!
  • Treasure trove discovered: my memoir in a box! - Want to read my short autobiographical essays like "No-Pants Griffith," "Whole Psychopath" and "Limb of Satan"? All true stories! You'll need a copy of AND NOW WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A PARTY: LINER NOTES TO A WRITER'S EARLY LIFE
  • Gorgeous Kelley - A gorgeous new headshot of the gorgeous Kelley Eskridge

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Books

Signed, personalised books - I'm teaming up with a new bookshop, Phinney Books, on Greenwood Avenue, Seattle, to bring you signed and personalised books.
Image description: Composite image of two book covers of So Lucky: A Novel, by Nicola Griffith. On the left, the UK edition. On a black background, a burning torch flames in orange and yellow up and across at least half the image. At the top, in between the flames are quotes from the Independent ‘a short, fast-paced whirlwind of a novel’ and BBC Culture‘a sophisticated thriller’. Below is the title, So Lucky in salmon-coloured type, and the author’s name, Nicola Griffith, in white. On the right, the US edition. The background is matte black with the title “So Lucky,” and the author’s name “Nicola Griffith,” in big uppercase type rendered as burning paper. In smaller, brighter letters between title and author is, “A novel,” and, below the writer’s name, “Author of Hild” So Lucky - Novel set in present-day Atlanta. Winner of the Washington State Book Award. "A short, fast-paced whirlwind of a novel... Spine tingling and in places downright terrifying." — Independent
Hild - Novel set in 7th-century Britain. Winner of the Washington State Book Award. "In its ambition and intelligence, Hild might best be compared to Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell." — Bookforum
The Aud Books - Winners of the Lambda literary Award, the InsightOut Book Club award, and the Alice B Medal. Three contemporary novels about Aud Torvingen: "One of my favorite kick-ass, super-competent, coolheaded, hotblooded, semilegal girls." — Salon
Slow River  - Novel set in the very near future. Winner of the Nebula Award and Lambda Literary Award. "Slow River elevates the genre, joining a select few books that shine as beacons of excellence." — Seattle Times
Ammonite - Novel set in the future on another planet. Winner of the Tiptree Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Premio Italia. "Nicola Griffith's first novel, Ammonite, flies all the banners of traditional sf but beneath the banners, it is armed to the teeth against convention." — Interzone
With Her Body - Short stories. "Griffith's particular attention to physical sensation and perception imbues the prose style of With Her Body with almost palpable heat."
And Now We Are Going to Have a Party - Memoir. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award. "...an extraordinary writer and an astonishingly brave woman. This is a map of the changing world, the world that changed as Nicola became the writer she is, and the world that has changed as so many women and queers and outlaw voices speak." — Dorothy Allison
Bending the Landscape - Winners of the World Fantasy Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and more. 3 anthologies of original queer speculative fiction. "The science fiction volume, like all the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE anthologies, addresses universal themes of otherness, love, and loss. Great reading for the 21st century." — Booklist

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Essays

  • Image description: Composite image of two book covers of So Lucky: A Novel, by Nicola Griffith. On the left, the UK edition. On a black background, a burning torch flames in orange and yellow up and across at least half the image. At the top, in between the flames are quotes from the Independent ‘a short, fast-paced whirlwind of a novel’ and BBC Culture‘a sophisticated thriller’. Below is the title, So Lucky in salmon-coloured type, and the author’s name, Nicola Griffith, in white. On the right, the US edition. The background is matte black with the title “So Lucky,” and the author’s name “Nicola Griffith,” in big uppercase type rendered as burning paper. In smaller, brighter letters between title and author is, “A novel,” and, below the writer’s name, “Author of Hild” Neither Dying Nor Being Cured - This is the essay version of the Ethel Louise Armstrong Lecture I gave last year at Ohio State University. It was first...
  • Guidelines for Non-Disabled Writers - Just republishing this for future reference. First published in Literary Hub, August 23, 2016 Recently I have read several articles about disabled...
  • Living Fiction, Storybook Lives - As individuals and societies we are shaped by story: our culture and sense of self literally cannot exist without it because we only know who and what we are when we can tell a story about ourselves. We learn how to tell our story by listening to the tales that are out there and picking through them, choosing some details and discarding others.
  • My Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby - "You were magnificent, I think, but hidden: a black hole at the heart of history. We can trace you only by your gravitational pull." This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2015.
  • The Women You Didn’t See: A Letter to Alice Sheldon - "You were brilliant, I think, but consumed by the inevitability of the abattoir. In your fiction all the gates are closed; characters are funnelled down a chute to flashing knives." Epistolatory criticism first published 2015.
  • Disability: Art, Scholarship, and Activism - On Friday May 13 I gave a presentation at the University of Washington’s Pacific & Western Disability Symposium. The theme of this...
  • Writing Slow River - Is there such a thing as an "essential self"? If so, can it be warped, encouraged, or destroyed? How far outside the moral and physical boundaries of that essential self would I we be willing to step in order to stay alive? And—if we stepped so far out that we became someone we did not recognise or like—would we still be us? I wrote Slow River to answer those questions.
  • Writing from the Body - Art and the Body are huge subjects with all kinds of branches and nooks and crannies. In what follows I poke around in those topics that interest me—the philosophy of dualism, cyberspace as nirvana, the concept of genius, the religious right—and see which pieces connect along the way.
  • As We Mean to Go On - An essay about how Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge met at a writing workshop and how books and the written word made their love possible.
  • Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow - I read Brackett's The Long Tomorrow for the first time in 2005. Five pages in, I wondered why I'd never heard of this novel. Twenty pages later, I was wondering why it wasn't universally acknowledged as the first Great American SF Novel.

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Appearances

In Person
I love to talk to students and readers but I have MS, I have books to write, and travel is tiring. If you want to invite me to speak or teach I need:
  • Plane tickets for two; I always travel with Kelley
  • Direct flights
  • For a flight over 4.5 hours, or more than two time zones, seats need to be First (domestic) or Business (international) class
  • A hotel stay that includes one night before the event
  • Step-free access
  • Fee (unless I’m there to sell my book as opposed to your tickets)

If that doesn’t frighten you, talk to me or my agent or my publicist. (You might want to read this more detailed list of things to think about first.)

Remote

I’m happy to do events (live interviews, teaching, readings) remotely via Zoom. In my experience an hour is best; ninety minutes can work; and two hours is too long. As with live in-person events, unless I’m there to sell my books as opposed to your tickets, I’ll require a fee.

If you intend a large, interactive audience I’ll also require a producer to handle moderation and technical trouble-shooting.

If that works, contact my publicist or speaking agent.

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Contact

Literary Agent

Stephanie Cabot
Susanna Lea Associates
646-638-1435

Film/TV Agent

Sylvie Rabineau
WME
310-786-4730

Speaking

Beth Martin Quittman
Samara Lectures
206-529-4711

Legal

Caitlin DiMotta
Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard LLP
212-497-0990

Nicola Griffith

For everything else, email me via this form—but if you want a blurb for your book or to invite me to visit, please read the relevant entries on blurbing and travel first:

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