My immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: I was the first queer person the State Department declared for it to be “in the National Interest” to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative power-brokers, and I ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where my case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed me down a bit, and I concentrated on writing. Novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007) and Hild (2013). My multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition. Essays and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. I've won a bunch o' awards e.g. Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, Lambda Literary Award (six times), and others.

I still sing, but now with a ukulele. I'm a dual US/UK citizen with a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, and am married to fab screenwriter Kelley Eskridge. We live in Seattle. Most of the time I'm happily lost in the seventh century (writing the second novel about Hild, Menewood), but I emerge to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.