Nicola Griffith

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.

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.

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."

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).

Griffith was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March 1993. She lives with her wife, author Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.

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.

Clarion accepted her with 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.

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. But traditional life made Griffith restless. To escape, she applied for two different international courses: one at a women’s martial arts camp in the Netherlands, one at the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University.

Griffith suffered some personal setbacks that had roots in 1985. By that time Helena had gone from addiction to also dealing heroin and amphetamines. As the year ended, Griffith (already sick with influenza) was hurt and briefly hospitalised after helping another women in a bar assault. Delayed reaction to the attack contributed to what she later characterised as PTSD in June 1986. Her writing and a women's self-defense course that she was teaching sustained her amid these difficulties, and Helena's counterexample helped persuade Griffith that the time to abandon all recreational drug use—including magic mushrooms, which she had relied on extensively—had come.

Griffith attempted her first fiction after the group disbanded. In 1983 Griffith wrote a diary entry detailing her dreams of becoming a "best-seller." She was writing her first (unpublished) novel, Greenstorm. Griffith began studying the physical art of self-defense the next year, and in August 1984 she smoked her last cigarette. The following month she gave up hashish and amphetamines. She received rejections of her manuscript from two publishers. Elements later to appear in Ammonite arose in a second unpublished (this one also unsubmitted) novel, "We Are Paradise" (ca. 1985).

Nicola Griffith (/ˈ n ɪ k ə l ə ˈ ɡ r ɪ f ɪ ð / ; 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.