Nicola Griffith

1960

Nicola Griffith is a British-American author whose work spans historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction and crime. She lives in Seattle, holds a doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University and founded the disability-literature initiative #CripLit with Alice Wong. Her novels have received numerous honours, including the Nebula, World Fantasy, Otherwise and Lambda Literary awards, and she was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2024.

Griffith’s principal historical work is the Hild Sequence. Hild and Menewood reconstruct seventh-century Britain through the early life of Hild of Whitby, placing her amid rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, religious conversion, dynastic politics and warfare. Working from the limited surviving evidence about the historical Hild, Griffith imagines how an observant royal woman could acquire influence within the court of Edwin of Northumbria and establish an independent community in Elmet. Spear moves into historical fantasy, reworking the Arthurian story of Percival as the journey of a young woman in sixth-century Wales. Griffith should therefore be classified as both a historical novelist for the Hild books and a historical fantasy author for Spear.

Periods and events

Arthurian Britain

Series

Series by Nicola Griffith (1 series)

The Hild Sequence in Order

by Nicola Griffith 2 books 4.0

The Hild Sequence reconstructs the early life of Hilda of Whitby from the few details preserved by Bede and places her within the unstable politics of seventh-century northern Britain. Nicola Griffith imagines Hild first as a perceptive child and royal kinswoman at the court of Edwin of Northumbria,…