Sarah Maria Griffin was born in Ireland in 1988 and grew up on the northside of Dublin.

She earned a degree in English, Media and Cultural Studies from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and a Masters in Creative Writing from NUI Galway.

She spent three years writing in San Francisco from 2012, and then came home to Ireland to write full time.

Her YA novels Spare and Found Parts (2016) and Other Words for Smoke (2019) were followed by her first adult novel, Eat the Ones You Love (Titan, 2025), and by Strange is the Light (2026). Other Words for Smoke won Teen and Young Adult Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards, and Eat the Ones You Love was named one of the Sunday Times's top ten Irish books of 2025.

She writes about video games for the Guardian, and her non-fiction has appeared in the Irish Times, the Stinging Fly and Winter Papers, among other places. She makes zines under the name Wordfury, co-hosts the Juvenalia podcast, and has been writer in residence at Maynooth University and for Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown.