Afternoon Tea with Nicola Griffith

Grab a cuppa and get to know the winner of this year’s Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses (ADCI) Literary Prize Winner, Nicola Griffith. Nicola will be in conversation with author and freelance journalist Penny Batchelor to discuss her work and career and offer a glimpse into her creative routine.

Read the full list of this year’s SoA Award winners.

Programme

• Welcome, introductions and housekeeping from Penny Batchelor (3 mins)
• Introduction from Nicola Griffith and a glimpse into her creative routine (30 mins)
• Nicola will do a short reading from her latest book Spear (2-5 mins)
• Q&A with the audience (10 mins)
• Summary and closing comments (2 mins)
• This event will be moderated by Lilly Brend-Fish – Events and Outreach Assistant, SoA | ADCI coordinator

Send us your questions in advance

If you would like to send questions in advance, email Lilly Brend-Fish on [email protected] with ‘ADCI Afternoon Tea – Question’ in the subject header. We will prioritise questions sent in advance and answer as many as we can from the audience on the day.

SoA @ Home Fundraising Bookshop

Browse our virtual Bookshop.org store featuring books by authors and speakers taking part in the SoA @ Home Festival. When you make a purchase using our affiliate links, a percentage will go to the Authors’ Contingency Fund, providing hardship grants to authors in financial difficulty.

The Line-up

Nicola Griffith – ADCI Literary Prize Winner

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and counselling at a street drugs agency, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: she was the first openly queer person for whom the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative power-brokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards.

In 2015 Nicola founded the Literary Prize Data working group whose purpose initially was to assemble data on literary prizes in order to get a picture of how gender bias operates within the trade publishing ecosystem.

Website: www.nicolagriffith.com | Twitter: @nicolaz | Linktree: linktr.ee/nicolagriffith

Penny Batchelor

Penny Batchelor is an alumni of Faber Academy’s six month ‘Writing a Novel’ course and the author of two psychological thrillers, My Perfect Sister and Her New Best Friend, both published by Embla Book

She is writing two more thrillers for Embla Books. Her short story ‘The Debate’ is in an anthology called UnLocked, published in November 2023 to raise money for The Trussell Trust by a group of authors who all debuted in 2020. With publisher Clare Christian, she is the co-founder of the ADCI Literary Prize and the #KeepFestivalsHybrid campaign. Penny is a regular columnist on publishing and disability issues for The Bookseller, and in 2022 she and author Victoria Scott successfully campaigned for Amazon to introduce a disability fiction character for adults in their books section.

Twitter: @penny_author | Instagram: @pennybatchelorauthor | Website: www.pennybatchelor.co.uk

About The Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses Network

The ADCI is a Society of Authors member support network for authors living and working with health challenges. The ADCI’s primary aim is to offer a friendly and supportive space where you can feel safe to ask questions, share experiences, offer advice, and make new connections.

Their main goals are:

• Enable disabled members to support each other through the exchange of practical advice around the writing process and disability issues.

• Encourage and enable more disabled characters in books, on screen, on the radio and online. We believe the best way of doing this is by raising the profile of disabled authors, building confidence, and helping more creative practitioners with disabilities to progress their careers.
• This network can also serve as a platform to better communicate with industry representatives, to raise awareness of the needs of disabled authors to encourage more inclusivity and to highlight the value of these writers to the industry.

If you’re interested in joining the ADCI network, email Lilly Brend-Fish.

Need to know 

Accessibility

• Attendees will have the option to turn on the live transcript option
• If you require BSL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected]

Before the event

• Once registered, you will be sent a confirmation email with the Zoom link
• If the confirmation email doesn’t arrive in your inbox, please check your junk/spam email folder
• Please add [email protected] to your Safe Senders list so you receive our confirmation, and reminder emails

During the event

• This online event will take place on Zoom Webinar; you will not be visible on screen but will be able ask questions via the Q&A function or interact via the chat box
• This event will be recorded but you won’t be on screen
• Attendees have the option to turn on the live transcript option
• This event is 45 minutes

After the event

• Hashtag for this event: #SoAatHome
• You’ll be able to catch the recording on our Vimeo channel

Booking

Book your place by using the registration below.

All #SoAatHome events are free but if you can afford to, please consider donating to our Authors’ Contingency Fund and we suggest a minimum donation of £5. The fund is to help professional authors experiencing financial hardship. DONATE HERE