BIOGRAPHY

Nicole Galland hails from Martha’s Vineyard Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. She’s a graduate of Harvard University, where she spent most of her time doing theatre, although she was actually getting a degree in Comparative Religion (and with that as an excuse, sojourned in India and Japan.) Her spiritual inquiries included a stint as a novice Buddhist nun near Kyoto. (Her deportation from the monastery followed abruptly on the heels of her questioning the abbot’s spiritual authority.)

Galland repatriated in California, where she co-founded a theatre 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 Bay Area and New York City, eking out a living in theatre, writing, editing, and temp work.

After winning an award for her screenplay The Winter Population, Galland moved to Los Angeles, where she spent a few years as a screenwriter. In April 2002 she rediscovered the unfinished outline to The Fool's Tale, which she’d begun in college, and 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 the book was completed in early 2003.

After a year and a half as Literary Manager/Dramaturg at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Galland moved back to the Vineyard to write full time. She recently married a high school classmate, Darren Lobdell, and is at work on her fourth novel.

 

 

Galland's Blog-To-Be

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