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. (These novels were recently reissued in the US by Picador, and published in the UK for the first time by Canongate.) 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. A new collection, She Is Here (2026) will be released in January as part of PM Press’s Outspoken Author series.
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. In 2024 she was inducted into the Museum of Popular Culture’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Hall of Fame, and in 2025 was named by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association as the 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.
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 and Eskridge live in Seattle on the edge of a ravine—but get to the UK every year or two. You can find her at her website, Gemæcce (her research blog), Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, and Facebook.
