Nicole Galland is an American novelist, first known for her historical fiction. She has gone on to write a near-future thriller, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. with Neal Stephenson and a contemporary/comic novel, Stepdog. She was an author of The Mongoliad, an historical epic fantasy. As E.D. deBirmingham, she wrote
Background
Galland was born in New York, but grew up in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a farming community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her maternal family has roots going back to the 18th century. Her mother works as a nurse and her stepfather, a Vietnam vet, was a Physician's Assistant at Martha's Vineyard only hospital. On her father's side she is first-generation American, her heritage being a combination of German Jew and Iraqi-Kurdish Jew. She graduated from Martha's Vineyard Regional High School as valedictorian of her class, before going on to study theatre and earn an honors degree in Comparative Religion at Harvard University, with a focus in Buddhism. She received a full fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of California at Berkeley. However, she withdrew from the program while battling severe depression and post-traumatic stress following a violent and bizarre assault at gunpoint, an encounter she would eventually use as fodder in her writing. Galland spent her 20s and 30s working in theatre, teaching, editing and juggling various odd jobs. This included co-founding a teen theater company in California that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Galland once described her eclectic life as existing at the whim of serendipity. Her screenplay, The Winter Population, won an award in 1998 but has yet to be produced. When her first novel, The Fool’s Tale, was published by William Morrow in 2005, she left her position as Literary Manager/Dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre to write full-time. While at Berkeley Rep she had written Revenge of the Rose, her second novel. Her third novel, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, was written over a 2-year period during which she essentially lived out of a backpack. Having resided in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City for years, Galland returned to Martha's Vineyard to live full-time. In addition to her novels, Galland has written for Salon.com and several Vineyard-based publications, including the Vineyard Gazette, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Edible Vineyard, of which she is a contributing editor.
Other information
She appears in the CD-ROM Star Wars: Rebel Assault II as Ina Rece. Galland has studied aikido. She has been involved in Vineyard theatre, working at the Vineyard Playhouse and with ArtFarm Enterprises. She is also the co-founder, with Chelsea McCarthy, of Shakespeare for the Masses, an off-season series presenting irreverent adaptations Shakespeare's plays on Martha's Vineyard.
