Narrator, curator, and teller of uncomfortable facts
About Nicola Briggs
Nicola’s work explores the intersection of memory, class, privilege, and race – with clarity, humour, and an eye for detail.
Nicola’s Story
Nicola Briggs was born in 1961 and grew up in Huddersfield. At the age of eleven, she was sent to boarding school – a move that would later shape the emotional core of her first memoir, Peacock on the Moon.
Nicola practised as a solicitor in Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Wilmslow for nearly forty years. A self-described “goody-two-shoes” at school – the sort of child who always finished first and put her hand up to prove it – she was, in many ways, well suited to the structure and seriousness of legal work.
But the law was never her end goal. “I fell into it through inadvertence,” she says – and after decades of navigating contracts, conveyancing, and clients, she finally walked away. “When the burning urge to write a memoir took over, the chains to the office were not that tight.”
Writing offered her a different kind of discipline: one that allowed for humour, curiosity, and a little rebellion.
When someone asked her partner to sum her up in one word, he paused for two seconds and said: Annoying.
Nicola suspects it may be the perfect title for her next book.
The Woman Behind the Words
For relaxation, she enjoys riding out on her Harley Sportster, practising yoga, or walking up hills. Relearning Spanish is essential, now she has a daughter living in Peru. The progeny of her two children closer to home need regular trips to the zoo and chocolate.
The journey to where she is now has shown her that people see what they want to see, good does not always prevail, and happiness lies in the simplest of things. The interesting and chaotic characters she has encountered along the way have given her plenty of fodder for her new writing career.
“Peacock on the Moon is my way of metaphorically sticking a leg out to see who falls over. I hope that some will stop to ask what they tripped on.”
Nicola Briggs
Peacock on the Moon
Nicola began writing Peacock on the Moon after rediscovering a set of family diaries. What started as a personal investigation into childhood memory became something much larger – a portrait of 1970s Britain through the lens of race, gender, and silence.
“I didn’t write this book to be clever or confessional. I wrote it because the diaries were there. And the story, it turns out, had been waiting for me.”
This coming-of-age memoir stands alone as a powerful portrait of family life – a family ruled by a charismatic, yet bigoted and self-destructive solicitor.