Nicola Griffith

Award-winning author Nicola Griffith is female, disabled, and queer. Disabled people fight institutional ableism, ableist people, the physical built environment, and the implicit bias we all grow up with and must consciously fight every single day. But when we overwrite the old disability script in our heads, we change the narrative. 

We changed queer literature, and the world, by writing our own stories. With disability, we can do it again. Story creates culture. It teaches us to feel, think and behave in ways generally approved of by those around us. Story conditions us. It constrains and guides our behavior. Implicit bias can’t be changed until we learn to see the old, embedded story and then find a new and better story to overwrite it.

Nicola Griffith’s body of award-winning fantasy and contemporary fiction centers the experience of ‘the Other’ and seeks to change readers’ perceptions of traditionally maligned groups through narrative empathy.  She will inspire her audience to write their own stories – whether literally through writing, or figuratively by breaking through their own preconceptions about their capabilities and destinies.  

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: she was the first openly queer person for whom the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” to live and work in the United States. This didn’t thrill the more conservative power-brokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards. Nicola, now a dual US/UK citizen, holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University.

She received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1993. Her essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals and media outlets, including the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, Electric Lit, Literary Hub, and Out. She is the author of many award-winning novels and has won the Washington State Book Award (twice), the Otherwise/Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, the Lambda Literary Award (six times), and others.  Her latest book, Spear, won the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Award and the inaugural ADCI Prize for positive representation of disability from the UK Society of Authors.

In 2015 she 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. (The $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize was established as a direct result.) In 2016 she began #CripLit, an online community for disabled writers for which, with Alice Wong, she co-hosts an occasional Twitter chat.