Nicole Galland

Nicole Galland is an American novelist of historical fiction.

Galland was born in New York, but grew up in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a farming community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her maternal family has roots going back to the 18th century. Her mother works as a nurse and her stepfather, a Viet Nam vet, was a Physician’s Assistant at Martha’s Vineyard only hospital. On her father’s side she is first-generation American, her heritage being a combination of German Jew and Iraqi-Kurdish Jew.

She graduated from Martha's Vineyard Regional High School as valedictorian of her class, before going on to study theatre and earn an honors degree in Comparative Religion at Harvard University, with a focus in Buddhism. She received a full fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of California at Berkeley. However, she withdrew from the program while battling severe depression and post-traumatic stress following a violent and bizarre assault at gunpoint, an encounter she would eventually use as fodder in her writing.

Galland spent her 20s and 30s working in theatre, teaching, editing and juggling various odd jobs. This included co-founding a teen theater company in California that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Galland once described her eclectic life as existing at the whim of serendipity.

Her screenplay, The Winter Population, won an award in 1998 but has yet to be produced. When her first novel, The Fool’s Tale, was published by William Morrow in 2005, she left her position as Literary Manager/Dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre to write full-time. While at Berkeley Rep she had written Revenge of the Rose, her second novel. Her third novel, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, was written over a 2-year period during which she essentially lived out of a backpack.

She is currently on the writing team of the Mongoliad, an experimental fiction project of the Subutai Corporation, of which Jeremy Bornstein is CEO.

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