Nicola Griffith


Nicola Griffith is a British American novelist, essayist, and teacher. She has won the Washington State Book Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, World Fantasy Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and six Lambda Literary Awards. In 2024 she was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2025, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named her the 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master in recognition of her significant contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy.

Personal life

Griffith was born 30 September 1960 in Leeds, to Margaret and Eric Griffith. Griffith's family is Catholic and she is one of five children. She knew she was gay by age 13.
Griffith is cousin to British actor Clare Higgins.
Griffith's 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.
Her early reading included the works of such novelists as Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliff; fantastic fiction including the works of E. E. Smith, Frank Herbert, and J. R. R. Tolkien; nonfiction and history – Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a particular favorite.
Griffith took interest in the sciences as a teenager. She entered University of Leeds to study microbiology but did not complete a degree. Griffith was the lead singer and cofounder of the band Janes Plane, which experienced some success in England before breaking up.
By the late 1980s, Griffith had begun experiencing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, though her illness remained undiagnosed. She was diagnosed with MS in March 1993.
While studying at Michigan State University, Griffith met and fell in love with fellow writer Kelley Eskridge. On 4 September 1993, Griffith and Eskridge announced their commitment ceremony in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, perhaps the first same-sex commitment announcement the paper had published. Griffith and Eskridge were legally married 4 September 2013.
Griffith wanted citizenship so she could remain in the country with her wife, but because she was a lesbian, she couldn't receive citizenship through marriage, and all other pathways were closed. After much effort, Griffith received permission to live and work in the United States based on her "importance as a writer of lesbian/science fiction," making her the first out lesbian to receive a National Interest Waiver. Her immigration resulted in a new law, and she is now a dual US/UK citizen.

Career

In late 1987 Griffith made her first professional fiction sale: "Mirrors and Burnstone" to Interzone. Her debut novel, Ammonite, received several offers from publishers, including St. Martin's Press, Avon Press, and Del Rey Books. Griffith has since published nine full-length novels, a memoir, and numerous short stories, essays, and novellas. While Griffith has said that she "resists labels to describe her work," much of her published material contains themes of gender and sexuality.
In 2015, Griffith "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."
In 2015 she began #CripLit, an online community for disabled writers."
In 2017, after completing her thesis, entitled "Norming the Queer: Narrative Empathy via Focalised Heterotopia," Griffith received her PhD by publication from Anglia Ruskin University.

Awards and honors

Publications

Fiction

  • Aud Torvingen series

  • The Hild Sequence series

  • Nonfiction

  • Anthologies

  • Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, Overlook Books,
  • Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Overlook Books,
  • Bending the Landscape: Horror, Overlook Books,

    Collections

  • Short fiction

  • "An Other Winter's Tale"
  • "Mirrors and Burnstone"
  • "The Other"
  • "We Have Met the Alien"
  • "The Voyage South"
  • "Down the Path of the Sun"
  • "Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese"
  • "Wearing My Skin"
  • "Touching Fire"
  • "Yaguara"
  • "A Troll Story"
  • "It Takes Two"

    Critical studies and reviews of Griffith's work

  • Review of Hild.