Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women's self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US.
Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place, (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction published by Overlook. Her awards include the Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is a memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life. She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, and takes enormous delight in everything.
You're currently working on a new novel, a "huge historical novel set in 7th century Britain". It sounds intriguing, to say the least.
It's the book I was born to write. It will change my life, and my career. It's the biggest challenge I've ever faced and I'm loving every minute of it. I feel renewed.
After ten years working from the first person perspective of a present-day unreliable narrator (the Aud novels), I'm now working in untethered third person/s in seventh century Britain. I'm reading poetry (and a little prose) in Ancient Welsh and Old Irish, in two dialects of Anglo-Saxon, in Latin. I feel as though I'm living in several worlds at once.
This novel (not even a working title yet) is about Hild, an Angle of Northumbria who became the first great abbess of England. She lived through enormous change. She facilitated a lot of that change; she altered the course of history. As far as I know, no one has yet written a novel about her.
I'm writing her life, from birth to death (at age 66). Currently she's eleven and I already have 42,000 words. It's going to be a big book.
I can't tell you how excited I am. All those languages and cultures crashing together in the seventh century, all that difference. All set in a landscape I know and love, that I'm familiar with on a DNA level.
I've set up a research blog, called Gemæcca, where I discuss the origins of the idea and my vision of Hild, detail some ongoing challenges, and solicit information from medievalists. I don't want to contravene what is known to be known. I want anyone, of any level of knowledge of history, to read this novel and nod, and say to themselves, "Yes, this is how it was." I want to change forever the way the world sees early medieval England.
Do you know how many people have asked me "I wonder when will Nicola Griffith write another SF novel…?"
People are already asking me when there'll be another Aud novel. I wish I could find a way to help readers understand that genre is just a tool; it's the story—the landscape, the people, the relationships—that counts. Genre is just the vehicle to most efficiently traverse that story landscape. All my fiction—the science fiction, the crime fiction, the literary fiction, the historical fiction—has the same concerns, the same love of language and place. I urge readers to climb the genre walls and play in a new garden every now and again.
I wish you'd never left SF, people say. But I haven't left it. It informs everything I write.
Continuing this interview, Nicola talks about her recent Lambda award for her memoir, and Now We Are Going To Have A Party.
