Nicola Griffith (born 30 September 1960 in Yorkshire, England) is a British-American novelist, essayist, and teacher. Griffith has won the Washington State Book Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards.
Nicola Griffith Life:
Griffith was born in Leeds, UK, to Margaret Mary and Eric Percival Griffith. Her parents--whom she describes in her 2007 memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, as wanting "to belong to the middle of the middle class ... to fit in" - reared Griffith and her four sisters in the Catholic faith. Her earliest surviving literary efforts include an illustrated booklet she was encouraged to create to prevent her from making trouble among her fellow nursery school students. At age eleven she won a BBC student poetry prize and read aloud her winning work for radio broadcast.
By late 1987 Griffith had made her first professional fiction sale, of a short story, "Mirrors and Burnstone," to Interzone. She was also experiencing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, though her illness remained unrecognised. Before her starting a job at the Unemployed Advice Centre, Griffith travelled with Taylor to Whitby Abbey, which she names as the site of one her happiest days ever. But traditional life made Griffith restless. To escape, she applied for two different international courses of study: one at a women's martial arts camp in the Netherlands, one at the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University.
Clarion accepted her--with the added inducement of a scholarship. Griffith crossed the Atlantic to attend Clarion in 1988. There, while she was studying with such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson, Kate Wilhelm, Tim Powers, and Samuel R. Delany, Griffith met and fell in love with writer Kelley Eskridge. A quarter-million-word correspondence between the two women ensued.
Nicola Griffith Career:
Nicola Griffith published her first novel Ammonite in 1993. It won both the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, BSFA Award, and Locus Award. Her second novel, Slow River (1994), won the Nebula Award, for best novel and another Lambda.
Together with Stephen Pagel, Griffith has edited a series of three anthologies, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998) and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001).
The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007) are linked novels about the character Aud Torvingen. Griffith's collection of stories, With Her Body (2004), comprises three short works. Her lone book of nonfiction, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life (2007), won the Lambda Literary Award in the Women's Memoir/Biography category. It is a multimedia memoir, a "do-it-yourself Nicola Griffith home assembly kit."
Griffith's novel Hild was published in November 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is set in seventh-century England.
She was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2013.
Nicola Griffith Bibliography:
Novels
- Ammonite (1993) - Slow River (1995) - The Blue Place (1998) - Stay (2002) - Always (2007) - Hild (2013)
Anthologies
- Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997, with Stephen Pagel) - Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998, with Stephen Pagel) - Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001, with Stephen Pagel)
Short fiction
- An Other Winter's Tale (1987) - Mirrors and Burnstone (1988) - The Other (1989) - We Have Met the Alien (1990) - The Voyage South (1990) - Down the Path of the Sun (1990) - Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese (1991) - Wearing My Skin (1991) - Touching Fire (1993) - Yaguara (1994) - A Troll Story (2000) - With Her Body (2004, a collection containing Touching Fire, Songs of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese, and Yaguara) - It Takes Two (2009) - Cold Wind (2014)
