Griffith was born 30 September 1960 inLeeds, to Margaret and Eric Griffith.[4] Griffith's family is Catholic and she is one of five children. She knew she was gay by age 13.[5]
Griffith's earliest surviving literary efforts include an illustrated booklet she was encouraged to create to prevent her from making trouble among her fellow nursery school students.[4]: 17 At age eleven she won a BBC student poetry prize and read aloud her winning work for radio broadcast.
Griffith took interest in the sciences as a teenager. She enteredUniversity of Leeds to study microbiology but did not complete a degree.[5] Griffith was the lead singer and cofounder of the band Janes Plane, which experienced some success in England before breaking up.[5]
By the late 1980s, Griffith had begun experiencing symptoms ofmultiple sclerosis (MS), though her illness remained undiagnosed. She was diagnosed with MS in March 1993.[9]
While studying atMichigan State University, Griffith met and fell in love with fellow writerKelley Eskridge.[9] On 4 September 1993, Griffith and Eskridge announced their commitment ceremony inThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution,[10] perhaps the first same-sex commitment announcement the paper had published. Griffith and Eskridge were legally married 4 September 2013.
Griffith wanted citizenship so she could remain in the country with her wife, but because she was a lesbian, she couldn't receive citizenship through marriage, and all other pathways were closed.[11] After much effort, Griffith received permission to live and work in the United States based on her "importance as a writer of lesbian/science fiction," making her the first out lesbian to receive a National Interest Waiver.[9] Her immigration resulted in a new law, and she is nowa dual US/UK citizen.[12]
In late 1987 Griffith made her first professional fiction sale: "Mirrors and Burnstone" toInterzone. Her debut novel,Ammonite, received several offers from publishers, includingSt. Martin's Press,Avon Press, andDel Rey Books.[9] Griffith has since published nine full-length novels, a memoir, and numerous short stories, essays, and novellas. While Griffith has said that she "resists labels to describe her work," much of her published material contains themes of gender and sexuality.[13]
In 2015, Griffith "founded the Literary Prize Data working group whose purpose initially was to assemble data on literary prizes in order to get a picture of how gender bias operates within the trade publishing ecosystem."[14]
In 2015 she began #CripLit, an online community for disabled writers."[14]
In 2017, after completing her thesis, entitled "Norming the Queer: Narrative Empathy via Focalised Heterotopia," Griffith received her PhD by publication from Anglia Ruskin University.[12][15]
