About
I was born in the UK now in the US.
My six novels, most recently
Hild, have all won awards and been translated other languages.
Hild is a novel focalised around the woman born more than 1400 years ago who is today known as St Hilda of Whitby. The novel aims to operate as a second-order discourse regarding the “contingency of events” and illusory nature of history’s seeming solidity (Butler and O’Donovan, 2012: 15). It is a serious historical novel in the well-researched, realist mode established by Sir Walter Scott
1 that deconstructs the intersectional construction of the oppressive discourse of gender, sexual orientation, and race (Reid, 2015).
In 2015 I founded the
Literary Prize Data, an international working group to uncover and tell the story of how gender bias operates within the publishing ecosystem. Direct results of that research include the $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize for prose and scripts by and about women (2016), and the new Her Voice literary festival in Toronto (2017). In 2016 I began #CripLit, an online community for writers with disabilities with >1,000 regular participants.
I’m now a dual US/UK citizen, hold a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and married to writer Kelley Eskridge in Seattle.
1 As described by Lukács, as opposed to Jameson’s assertion of Scott’s essential melodrama (Anderson 2011).
Butler, C. and O’Donovan, H. (2012).
Reading History in Children’s Books. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reid, R. (2015). Nicola Griffith’s
Hild: the authenticity of intersectionality. In: H. Young, ed.
The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst: Cambria, pp 75-90.
