Nicola Griffith was born in Yorkshire, England. Her first paid work was on an archaeological dig when she was 15. At 17 she went to the University of Leeds to study microbiology but dropped out and moved to Hull, and fronted a band. She studied several martial arts and worked as a women’s self-defence teacher. In 1988 she attended Clarion, where she met fellow writer Kelley Eskridge, and moved to the US in 1989. In 1993, the same year she was diagnosed with MS, they married each other in the back garden. In 1994 the State Department deemed it to be in the National Interest for her to live and work in the US and in 2013 she became a dual UK/US citizen. Later that year, she and Eskridge were legally married.
Griffith’s first published story was “Mirrors and Burnstone” (1988). Other stories include award finalists “Touching Fire” (1993), “Yaguara” (1995), and “It Takes Two” (2009). Three of her stories were collected in With Her Body (2004).
Griffith’s debut novel Ammonite (1993) won the Tiptree/Otherwise Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Premio Italia. Slow River (1995) won a Nebula and another Lambda. Crime novel The Blue Place (1998) began the Aud Torvingen series, continued in Stay (2002) and Always (2007), all of which won awards. Hild (2013) a historical novel won the Washington State Book Award. So Lucky (2018), a contemporary thriller of the body, won another, and Spear (2022), a queer Arthurian fantasy, won the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her latest novel, Menewood (2023), is the sequel to Hild.
Griffith’s multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party (2007) won another Lambda—as did the three anthologies she co-edited for the Bending the Landscape series. Her shorter work has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist, NPR, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was inducted into the SFF Hall of Fame, and in 2025 named by SFWA as their 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.
In 2015 Griffith’s statistical survey of bias in the literary prize ecosystem went viral and she was interviewed on four continents. She began using a wheelchair in 2016, and founded and co-hosted #CripLit, a series of Twitter chats for writers with disabilities. In 2017 she earned a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University.
She lives in Seattle on the edge of a ravine and takes enormous delight in everything.
Follow Nicola:
She Is Here
SKU: 9798887441498
Author: Nicola Griffith
Series: PM Press
ISBN: 9798887441498
Published: 01/27/2026
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Pages: 160
Subjects: Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, LGBTQ+
Praise
“Dazzling . . . Griffith’s lyrical prose emphasizes the savagery of the political landscape.”
—Paris Review Daily on Hild
“Uncompromisingly packed with non-dogmatic feminist and queer ideologies. . . . Griffith reveals herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ms. Griffith is an astonishingly gifted writer. . . . Her work is of the very best in the lesbian and gay literary field.”
—Allen Ginsberg
“In Griffith’s hands, a conversation . . . is as thrilling as a spear thrust through a man’s cheek.”
—Nicole Rudick, New York Review of Books on Menewood
“Gorgeously supple prose . . . startlingly beautiful”
—Amal El-Mohtar, on Hild, NPR
“With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines, Slow River is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us.”
—Gary Wolfe, Locus
“Nicola Griffith’s prose is beautiful in every sense of the word.”
—April Adams, The Lesbian Review
“Griffith brings all her genius to this book.”
—Maria Dahvana Headley on Menewood
“A serious assault on conventions so enormous that it is very much more dangerous, sometimes, than writing about lesbianism.”
—Dorothy Allison on Ammonite
“A body-slam of empowerment, a roar of frustration so sustained and compelling that it cannot be ignored.”
—Katharine Coldiron, Arts Fuse on So Lucky
“Incisive and devastatingly beautiful.”
—Vulture on Spear
“Brutal, unsparing . . . full of power and healing.”
—Joanne Rixon, Seattle Times review of So Lucky
“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
“A queer Arthurian masterpiece for the modern age.”
—Los Angeles Times on Spear
“Hild is a world built fiber by fiber from the ground up, immersive as a river in rain.”
—Amal El-Mohtar, NPR, on Hild
“Griffith’s prose is at once brutal and beautifully wrought”
—San Diego Union-Tribune on Stay
“A knockout!”
—Ursula K. Le Guin on Ammonite
“Fierce! A disconcerting but very necessary book.”
—Dana Hansen, Chicago Review of Books, on So Lucky
“A classic for the ages.”
—Karen Rought, Subjectify, on Spear
“Luxuriously long and utterly absorbing.”
—The Guardian, on Hild
Book Events
july, 2025
No Events