Nicola Griffith
| Nicola Griffith | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
30 September 1960 Yorkshire, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story author, essayist |
| Nationality | England |
| Period | 1987 – |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Website | |
| nicolagriffith |
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Nicola Griffith (/ˈnɪkələ ˈɡrɪfɪð/; born 30 September 1960 in Yorkshire, England) is a British-American novelist, essayist, and teacher. Griffith has won the Washington State Book Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards.
Griffith was born in Leeds, UK, to Margaret Mary and Eric Percival Griffith. Her parents—whom she describes in her 2007 memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, as wanting "to belong to the middle of the middle class … to fit in" —reared Griffith and her four sisters in the Catholic faith. Her 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.
As a pre-teen Griffith felt same-sex attractions, and by sometime in her thirteenth year, she knew: "I was a dyke." She also felt cautioned by her parents' punishing response after one of her sisters acted on such desires at age fifteen. Thus her conclusion that "no hint of how I felt must be allowed …. Not until I reached sixteen," when she would no longer be a minor. To cope she began to drink—alcohol served as a useful suppressant. She drank, smoked cigarettes on the sly, and immersed herself in reading and music in search of escape. In addition to the classics of English literature, she read 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 about life sciences and history—Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a particular favorite; and such poetry as Homer's Iliad and John Masefield's Cargoes. Her musical choices showed a similar divide: the classical canon, traditional church compositions, and folk music offset by David Bowie and other glam rockers. During that time a visit to relatives in Glasgow, Scotland—in particular a behind-the-scenes tour of a power station, with its efficient water recycling system—left Griffith feeling "terribly alert." She paid more attention thereafter to the occasional school course that interested her—chemistry, physics, and biology especially—and at age fourteen broadened her artistic tastes to encompass the works of William S. Burroughs, Led Zeppelin, and early Pink Floyd.
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