Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith (born 30 September 1960) 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 and six Lambda Literary Awards.

Griffith was born 30 September 1960 in Leeds, to Margaret and Eric Griffith.

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 — Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a particular favorite;.

By the late 1980s, Griffith had begun experiencing symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), though her illness remained undiagnosed.

By 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 and novellas.

She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 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.

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 Focalized Heterotopia," Griffith received her PhD by publication from the University of East Anglia.