This year is the 1400th anniversary of Hild’s birth. According to Bede.* Given that her feast day is mid-November, and in my novel her birthday is mid-October, I’ve decided autumn would be a splendid time to celebrate.
Read more "Latin for fourteen hundredth anniversary?"It was a challenge to set aside the most recent hypotheses about the ethnogenesis of the English and write purely from Hild’s experience, her cultural perspective.
Read more "Anglo-Saxon ethnic origin stories"Hild will be out in the UK on Thursday July 24. The first UK notices are beginning to appear. I’m particularly proud of two. One from Alex Woolf…the other from Max Adams.
Read more "HILD out in the UK on Thursday 24th July"I’m now into <iHild II (working title Menewood) and I’ve started to wonder about the location of Hild’s first religious foundation. Aidan, when he recruited Hild to the Church in AD 647, gave her a single hide of land on which to live for a year. Bede tells us only that this land was “ad septentrionalem plagam Viuri fluminis.”
Read more "Hild’s first religious foundation"On To the Best of Our Knowledge I’m “Getting Medieval” with fellow writers George R.R. Martin, Karen Joy Fowler, and Bruce Holsinger, weapons expert Kelly DeVries, and more! To coincide with this weekend’s premier of Game of Thrones Season 4, it’s a whole hour of conversation about why we’re so interested in the Middle Ages.However, […]
Read more "Getting Medieval on "To the Best of Our Knowledge""Original art by Anna and Elena Balbusso, original design by Charlotte Strick, UK design by Sian Wilson Blackfriars, the UK and Commonwealth publisher of Hild, is a brand new literary imprint of Little, Brown. Hild will be their first ever hardback.
Read more "The UK cover of HILD"Over on my personal blog I’ve followed my annual tradition of filming the destruction of our Christmas tree. However, I thought photon torpedoes might not be the thing for medievalists. So here’s something just for you: Have a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year.
Read more "Dragons for Christmas!"Two pieces of news. On Wednesday, the twentieth anniversary of our first (not legal) wedding, Kelley and I got married in the eyes of the US government. Some more nifty blurbs for Hild:
Read more "Some news"I’ve been posting chunks of early reviews etc. on the Hild page of my main blog but thought I’d include a few snippets here to whet your appetite:
Read more "Some advance praise for Hild…"Here’s a long and meaty conversation between me and my editor Sean McDonald (VP and Executive Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux) about the making of Hild. I talk about going to Whitby for the first time, years ago, and having the fundamental realisation that shaped my writing career and made Hild inevitable:
Read more "Shoutout to favourite bloggers in an interview about writing Hild"— This is a cross-post from my personal blog, Ask Nicola — My box of Hild ARCs* arrived on Friday. Many of them are already spoken for but I have a handful extra. So who wants one? If you’re a loyal reader, I’ll be doing a random giveaway later just for you, just because. I’m […]
Read more "Who wants a free reading copy of HILD?"Coming 11.12.13 This is the cover of my novel, Hild (available for pre-order) which will be published in the US on 12 November 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (When I know UK and other publication dates I’ll post them.) I love it. It’s not perfect. First, what I love. As this is a JPEG, […]
Read more "The cover of HILD"detail from the cover of Hild * This blog began in 2008 with a medievalist blogger’s meme game about favourite historical characters. (I was tagged by Michelle of Heavenfield.) I desperately wanted to talk about Hild, the main character of the novel I was working on at the time. But I had no blog. I built one. So […]
Read more "Ten questions and answers about Hild"This is the seventh draft of Hild. It is the version you will read (after some copyediting). It will be published in the US on 12th November by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. At this stage I don’t know when it will be published in the UK, or by whom. I’m guessing I’ll have a notion […]
Read more "Hild: 12 November 2013"After discovering the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture I’ve been playing with Photoshop, imagining what Hild’s grave marker might look like. (This is just a first pass. It will end up looking much better when I’ve futzed with it.) This is adaptated from the Hildithryth stone found at St Hilda’s in Hartlepool. My dream is that […]
Read more "Hild’s grave"