Nicole Galland hails from Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts.
She’s a graduate of Harvard University, where she spent most of her time
doing theater and secretly penning unfinished novels, although she was officially
getting a degree in Comparative Religion, with an emphasis on Buddhism.
Repatriating in California, Nicole co-founded a theater company
for teens that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was awarded
a full fellowship to pursue a PhD in Drama at UC Berkeley, where she showed
great promise at pretentious performance art. Before academia could entirely
seduce her, however, she withdrew from the program and split the next several
years between the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, eking out a living
in theater, writing, editing, and temp work.
After winning an award for her screenplay The Winter Population,
Nicole somewhat recklessly moved to Los Angeles, where she spent a few years
as a screenwriter and learned how to play the banjo (quite badly). In April
2002, she rediscovered the unfinished outline to The Fool's Tale, which she’d
begun in college. She was about to delete it from her hard drive when she decided,
just for fun, to see what would happen if she finished it instead. After a
high concentration of serendipity (which you can read about on her website),
the book was completed in early 2003, by which time she'd fled LA to return
to the Bay Area. The Fool's Tale was published to critical acclaim in early
2005, and Revenge of the Rose followed in 2006.
After a year and a half as Literary Manager/Dramaturg for Berkeley
Repertory Theatre, Nicole left the Bay Area and spent a while living largely
out of a backpack, traversing the Mediterranean researching and drafting her
third novel, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade. Finally, after 20-odd years
away, she moved back to the Vineyard. She spent a year and a day tinkering
with Moby Rich, a contemporary serialized novel published a-chapter-a-week
by the Vineyard Gazette, and is now delighted to be returning to
"historical" fiction. She and her friend Chelsea McCarthy co-founded
Shakespeare for the Masses, a semi-insane troupe pf actors who, with a single
day of rehearsal, perform script-in-hand performances of Galland-and-McCarthy's
adapted versions of Shakespeare. To their delight and bewilderment, they have
developed a small cult following on Martha's Vineyard, and hope to subject
the rest of the nation to their work in due time.
Most recently, she was invited to join the cabal creating The
Mongoliad, an on-line, collectively written novel by Neal Stephenson and friends.
In the spring of 2008, Nicole will embark on a year-long writing
project with the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, which will spill over into a blog
you can access by clicking the link above. Meanwhile, that same link will take
you to some other pages she’s fooling around with, including photos (yes, photos)
related to her historical fiction.
“A great yarn. Galland
has an exceptional gift for characters and relationships.” – Neal
Stephenson, author of The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World
