Griffith was born 30 September 1960 in Leeds, to Margaret and Eric Griffith.[3] Griffith's family is Catholic and she is one of five children. She knew she was gay by age 13.[4]
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.[3]: 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 entered University of Leeds to study microbiology but did not complete a degree.[4] Griffith was the lead singer and cofounder of the band Janes Plane, which experienced some success in England before breaking up.[4]
By the late 1980s, Griffith had begun experiencing symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), though her illness remained undiagnosed. She was diagnosed with MS in March 1993.[7]
While studying at Michigan State University, Griffith met and fell in love with fellow writer Kelley Eskridge.[7] On 4 September 1993, Griffith and Eskridge announced their commitment ceremony in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,[8] 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.[9] 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.[7] Her immigration resulted in a new law, and she is now a dual US/UK citizen.[10]
Career
In late 1987 Griffith made her first professional fiction sale: "Mirrors and Burnstone" to Interzone. Her debut novel, Ammonite, received several offers from publishers, including St. Martin's Press, Avon Press, and Del Rey Books.[7] 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 describer her work," much of her published material contains themes of gender and sexuality.[11]
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."[12]
In 2015 she began #CripLit, an online community for disabled writers."[12]
In 2017, after completing her thesis, entitled "Norming the Queer: Narrative Empathy via Focalized Heterotopia," Griffith received her PhD by publication from the University of East Anglia.[10][13]