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Photograph of Nicola Griffith, 2014
Njgriffith · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Licence · Wikimedia Commons

Sapphic romance

Nicola Griffith

born 1960

Novelist of Ammonite, Slow River and Hild; six-time Lambda Literary Award winner.

Born
30 September 1960 · Leeds, England
Nationality
British-American
  • science fiction
  • historical fiction
  • Arthurian
  • disability
  • Lambda Literary Award

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Nicola Griffith, their publishers or their estate. Nicola Griffith appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Nicola Griffith was born in Leeds and is a British-American novelist, essayist and teacher. She writes across science fiction, crime, historical fiction and contemporary fiction, and her heroines are, as a rule, women who love women. Her first novel, Ammonite (1992), is set on a planet where a virus has killed every man.

She has won the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Washington State Book Award twice and six Lambda Literary Awards. Besides her fiction she is known for feminist and queer writing, disability advocacy, and founding the Literary Prize Database Project and the #CripLit community for disabled writers.

Works

Major works

  1. 1992Ammoniteher debut, science fiction
  2. 1995Slow Riverwon the Nebula Award for Best Novel and a Lambda Literary Award
  3. 1998The Blue Placethe first Aud Torvingen novel
  4. 2013Hilda historical novel of the life of Hilda of Whitby
  5. 2018So Luckyan autobiographical novel about life with multiple sclerosis
  6. 2022Speara retelling of the Arthurian legend
  7. 2023Menewoodthe sequel to Hild

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1992

    Published her debut novel, Ammonite.

  2. 1993

    Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March, after symptoms she had had since the late 1980s.

  3. 1995

    Slow River won the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

  4. 2013

    Published Hild.

  5. 2024

    Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

  6. 2025

    Named the 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

Why they are here

Nicola Griffith and the shelf

Relevance

Griffith shows how wide a sapphic shelf can be: a science-fiction first novel, a crime series, a seventh-century historical epic and an Arthurian retelling, all with women's love at the centre of the story. For readers of fantasy and historical fiction she is the key name.

Influence

Ursula K. Le Guin called Ammonite "a knock-out first novel". Her prize record spans both the fantasy and the queer-literature worlds.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Nicola Griffith, and they are not a recommendation on Nicola Griffith’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Nicola Griffith is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.