Hild (Griffith) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—September 30, 1960
• Where—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—Michigan State University Writing Workshop
• Awards—Nebula Award; World Fantasy Award; 6 Lambda Awards;
   James Tiptree, Jr. Award;
• Currently—Seattle, Washington, USA


Nicola Griffith is a British science fiction author, editor and essayist. Griffith is a 1988 alumnus of the Michigan State University-Clarion science fiction writing workshop and has won a Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards.

Personal life
Nicola Griffith was born in Yorkshire, England, the fourth of five sisters. The youngest, Helena, died in a police-chase in Australia in 1988, and one of her older sisters, Carolyn, died in 2001. Griffith has stated in interviews that grief and rage over her sisters' deaths have played a large part in the writing process for her novels. In March 1993, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Griffith lives with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle, Washington (in the US).

Career
Nicola Griffith published her first novel Ammonite in 1993. It won both the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award. Her second novel, Slow River (1994), won the Nebula Award, for best novel, and another Lambda.

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). These explore gay and lesbian issues in fantastic settings.

The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007) are crime novels. Her collection of stories, With Her Body (2004) is science fiction and fantasy. Her memoir 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 multi-media memoir, a "do-it-yourself Nicola Griffith home assembly kit."

Griffith's historical novel Hild (2013) is set in seventh-century England and based on the real life of St. Hilda of St. Whitsby. It takes place at the time of the Synod of Whitby in CE 642, in which Oswiu of Northumbria decided whether or not to adopt Celtic or Roman Catholic Christianity. In 2013,  Griffith was also awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2013. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/18/13.)