SPEAR wins the ADCI Literary Prize!

Nicola Griffith

Jun 29

I'm over the moon to announce that Spear has won the UK Society's of Authors' inaugural ADCI Literary Prize. I can't be at the ceremony because I'll at 30,000 feet over the Irish Sea on my way to spend time with family and then take part in my very first International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Otherwise I would absolutely be there. This award is a big deal for disability representation in literature. I would like to have been able to show the proper honour and gratitude to the event. Plus—a party! And people I haven't seen for years! And many new friends to meet! But, oh well. It's still fucking amazing

Here's the press release:

Nicola Griffith wins the inaugural ADCI Literary Prize. Jay Gao and Louise Kennedy are among the 30 other winners at this year's SoA Awards.

Nicola Griffith has today (29 June) won the inaugural ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize, for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing), a lyrical, queer reimagining of Arthurian legend, in which 'those usually airbrushed from history take centre stage' (ADCI Literary Prize judge Penny Batchelor).

The prize, launched in 2022 to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature, was announced alongside ten other prizes which make up the annual Society of Authors' Awards. The SoA Awards is the UK's biggest literary prize fund, worth over £100,000, this year shared between 30 writers, poets and illustrators.

The ADCI Literary Prize

Sponsored by Arts Council England, ALCS, the Drusilla Harvey Memorial Fund, and the Professional Writing Academy, the ADCI Literary Prize is awarded to a disabled or chronically ill writer, for an outstanding novel containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. Judged by Penny Batchelor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nydia Hebden, Karl Knights, Julia Lund, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Vikki Patis and Chloe Timms.

ADCI Literary Prize judge Rowan Hisayo Buchanan said:

I was hugely impressed by this work. There is real ambition and fluidity to the writing. It represents a vast amount of research and yet it wears that research lightly. While there was much recognizable to anyone with a glancing knowledge of Arthurian legend, there was also much that felt new. Griffith combines pre-existing myths in inventive and delightful ways. The representation in this story is joyful–acknowledging what might cause a character to be seen as other but finding no shame in it.

I love the fact that the crip representation—and the queer rep, and the Black rep—is called out as joyful. That is always my aim: to not just norm the other but to celebrate and revel in it, to make the queer/crip body a site of delight. We've all read too many stories where the women, the queer, crip, Black, poor, trans, nonbinary, old (and on and on) suffer for being who we are. I decided long ago that, nope, not doing that. The single exception in all my published work is So Lucky, because I needed to tell the story of a woman understanding what ableism has done to her, and dismantling and moving past her own, internalised ableism—which is hard (maybe impossible) to do without exploring how that feels (which, spoiler alert, is bad). It was a kind of exorcism.

Spear has none of that, just the joy and occasional ordinariness felt by Peretur (and Llanza and Bedwyr and Hywel) both in their everyday lives and in heightened moments. Spear (like Menewood, and Hild before that) is about expanding and sharpening history, taking the single subject of most heroic historical fiction—the straight, white, nondisabled, noble man—and adding in the people who have always been there and always ignored, the people like us. I'm reforging history from a soft, useless piece of iron to an alloy: light, strong, far more resilient, and, most importantly, much more true.

Thank you to the sponsors of the award, Arts Council England, ALCS, the Drusilla Harvey Memorial Fund, and the Professional Writing Academy; to the judges, Penny Batchelor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nydia Hebden, Karl Knights, Julia Lund, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Vikki Patis and Chloe Timms; and to author Penny Batchelor and publisher Clare Christian who alongside the Society of Authors, founded this prize. I'm thrilled beyond words that my Little Book That Could has been read and understood and honoured in this way.

I wish I could have been there—but I will be doing a Society of Authors event with Penny Batchelor, livestreamed 13 July at 17:30 - 18:15 BST/09:30 - 10:15 PT. It's free, and those who can't watch it live will be able to watch the video later on SoA's Vimeo channel.