As a powerful coding strategy for superpixels in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, Fisher vector (FV) lies in a low-dimensional subspace and can be sparsely represented as a linear combination of training samples. The existing ship detection methods based on FVs often consider the Euclidean distances between target FVs and clutter FVs, where the subspace features of FVs are generally not exploited. In this article, we propose a new ship detection algorithm based on nonnegative sparse locality-representation (NSLR) to exploit the subspace features of FVs. The proposed NSLR method is based on the assumption that FVs of superpixels in SAR images are sparsely represented by the dictionary of background sea clutter only under a null hypothesis. In addition, we propose two FV-based filters to enhance the robustness of our newly developed NSLR to heterogeneous sea clutter environments by further exploiting the intrinsic features of ship targets in terms of intensity and spatiality. The experimental results based on Gaofen-3 SAR images demonstrate that the proposed NSLR detection method provides higher target-to-clutter contrast and achieves better detection performance than other commonly used ship detection algorithms.