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 Hot New Streaming 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, smile your creamy smile, figure out who you are now, and come back for more.
Bio—full
Nicola Griffith was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Her first paid work was on an archaeological dig—excavating a Roman villa near Helmsley—when she was 15. At 17 she went to the University of Leeds to study science but dropped out after a few months and moved to Hull, where she fronted a band, Janes Plane. She has studied several martial arts—most recently escrima—and, until her diagnosis with MS in 1993, worked as a women’s self-defence teacher. She has also taught a variety of creative writing workshops and courses at various levels. In 1988 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University, where she met fellow writer Kelley Eskridge, and moved to the US in 1989. The couple were married in 1993, though the marriage was not legally recognised. In 1994 Griffith’s immigration case made new law when the State Department declared her an alien of exceptional ability and deemed it to be in the National Interest for her to live and work in the US. She became a dual UK/US citizen in spring of 2013. Later that year, on the 20th anniversary of their original ceremony, she and Eskridge were legally married.
Griffith’s first literary award was a BBC North poetry prize for a piece submitted without her knowledge by a teacher. Her first professionally published story was “Mirrors and Burnstone,” in the UK magazine Interzone (1988). Other notable stories include BSFA Award finalist and Tiptree Honour story “Touching Fire” (1993), Nebula Award nominee “Yaguara” (1995), and Hugo Award and Locus Award finalist “It Takes Two” (2009). Three of her stories were collected in With Her Body (2004).
Griffith’s debut novel Ammonite (1993), “heart-wrenching in its emotional power” (New Statesman and Society), won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial (now Otherwise) Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Premio Italia, and was a finalist for the Locus, Arthur C. Clarke and British SF Association Awards. Slow River (1995), “a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us” (Locus), won a Nebula Award and another Lambda Award and was a finalist for the Seiun Award. Literary crime novel The Blue Place (1998), “brilliant, a bracing, stylized thriller” (Village Voice), began the Aud Torvingen series—which continued in Stay (2002) and Always (2007)—all of which won awards. Hild (2013), “Brilliant—mystical, beautiful and poetic, radiant in its adventures and its reverence” (Los Angeles Times), is an historical novel about Saint Hilda of Whitby, and won the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, was a Tiptree Honour Book, and finalist for the Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial, Lambda Literary, and Bisexual Book Awards. So Lucky (2018), “Brutal, unsparing, full of power and healing” (Seattle Times), is a contemporary thriller of the body and won another Washington State Book Award. Spear (2022), “a queer Arthurian masterpiece for our time” (Los Angeles Times), won the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a finalist for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and a Locus Award, was longlisted for the Historical Writers Association Gold Crown, and was named to many Best Of Year lists. Her new novel, Menewood (2023), “a masterpiece” (New York Times), is the continuation of the story of Hild of Whitby.
Griffith wrote a multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life (2007), another Lambda winner, and edited three award-winning anthologies with Stephen Pagel: Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998), and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001). Her shorter work, essays, opinions, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist, NPR, Foundation, Los Angeles Book Review, Out, Electric Lit, Literary Hub and others. Other honours and awards include official recognition from King County Council, the Alice B medal, Galactic Suburbia Award, and the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, plus travel and research awards from various granting bodies in the US and UK. She was inducted into the Science Fiction + Fantasy Hall of Fame at the Museum of Popular Culture in 2024.
In 2015 Griffith published a statistical survey of bias in the literary prize ecosystem showing that stories about women did not win the most prestigious literary prizes. The data went viral and she was interviewed on four continents. Many others took the work forward, applying the statistical approach to various genres, and the $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize was established as a direct result.
Griffith began using a wheelchair in 2016, and in that year founded, and, with Alice Wong, co-hosted #CripLit, a series of Twitter chats for writers with disabilities. In 2017 she earned a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Her thesis, Norming the Other: Narrative Empathy Via Focalised Heterotopia has been cited numerous times. She serves on several advisory and editorial boards such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Journal of Historical Fictions, and Duke University Press’s Practises series, and has served as a board trustee for a variety of nonprofit boards such as the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Multiple Sclerosis Association.
Griffith loves reading as performance and in 2018 began narrating the audiobooks of her novels: So Lucky, Spear, and soon—as they are reissued by Picador/Macmillan—all three Aud novels. She and Eskridge live in Seattle on the edge of a ravine.
Bio—short
Nicola Griffith is the author of nine novels, including Hild, Spear, and Menewood. In addition to her fiction and nonfiction (New York Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist) she is known for her data-driven 2015 work on bias in the literary ecosystem and as founder and co-host, with Alice Wong, of #CripLit. Awards include the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize, two Washington State Book Awards, the Premio Italia, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise/Tiptree awards, and six Lambda Literary Awards. She holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University, is married to writer Kelley Eskridge, and lives in Seattle.
Social Media
I have accounts on various platforms but some I don’t use much, or at all, or only at certain times of year, or am contemplating abandoning. I’ve listed them in alphabetical order, along with notes about my presence there.
- Bluesky—I use this a lot. It’s largely replaced Xitter for me. I like the relaxed, non-selling vibe. It feels like Twitter 12 years ago.
- Gemæcce.com—My research blog, where I take deeper, more intense dives in a research on all things Early Medieval.
- Facebook Author Page—This currently mirrors Gemæcce.com, my research blog.
- Facebook Profile—I use this a fair amount. Lots of photos of cats and flowers and links to upcoming events. Some personal photos. Sometimes, but not always, mirroring Instagram. But I keep notifications off, so I miss a lot, and I never respond here to personal messages, only to comments on posts.
- Instagram—I use this a lot. Pictures of travel and people, books and cats and flowers. A fair amount of reposting others’ posts about my books.
- LinkedIn—Currently this just mirrors my personal blog. I don’t use the messaging and admit I don’t go look at other people’s posts.
- Mastodon—I’m still figuring Mastodon out. It has a different vibe to the other mini-blogging platforms. I like the people—I ijust haven’t found many (so lease say hello!). Right now I tend to repost links to my blog posts with the occasional something else—a book, a person, a cat—to see how it flies.
- Substack—I got signed up for this by mistake when I did a recent interview for a Substack publication. I doubt I’ll ever use it (because I dislike their business practices and political stance) but I haven’t deleted it because I’m fascinated by how people find me there and sign up to my (so far) non-existent publication.
- Threads—My feel for the general vibe here is slightly off—as it was for years with Facebook—but I mostly just use it to link to blog posts, with the occasional cat picture for variety. Basically, I haven’t found my people here—so if you know me, say hello!
- Website—Obviously, here, this blog. And pages for individual books (which, in turn, link to relevant book-related reviews, interviews, readings, and fan art), my About page and Events page, links to essays, and so on. This is basically the Big Archive of Me.
- YouTube—This is for two things. One, my Blow Shit Up! channel, in which I use FX to destroy our Christmas Tree every year in loud and messy ways—if I can include the cats, that’s a bonus. I also post the occasional reading or panel or interview. But, yeah, mostly blowing shit up :)
Signed, Personalised Books
Here’s how to get signed, and occasionally 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.”
Auraist: Guide to Prose Style
My interview-essay on Spear, prose style and voice; using tense to delay or accelerate characterisation; a bit of a rant about the whole misery-lit-is-better-lit fallacy, and more.
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.
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…
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.
Portfolio
I’ve started a portfolio of Op-Eds, reviews, and essays at Muckrack which I’ll add to gradually—as and when I remember.
Contact
For most things, please contact the relevant agent, listed here.
For everything else, email me via this form:
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Nicola Griffith 