Susan Griffin was born on 14 May 1952 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, daugther of Maureen McGinnity and Norman Griffin. She obtained a Bachelor in English at University Sussex on 1973. On 1976, she married Tim Curran, and they divorced on 1980. On 1980, she remarried Ray Curnow, and they divorced on 1988. On 1997, she remarried Paul Frederick Simmonds, and they live between in central Norwich, England and in the Loire valley, France. She has two children: Rufus and Evan.

She is a professional writer since 1979, and has since written or co-written more than 30 published books, including a wide range of non-fiction books and novels for Collins and Constable, she also wrote under the pseudonym of Sally Cook for Mills & Boon. She researches the life of real people to her novels, and now also to write biographies. During the course of her researches she visited many of the places in both England and France.

In the 1990s Susan set up with a group of writer friends and ran a small fiction publisher, Rampant Horse. Since 1997 she has run Curran Publishing Services Ltd, www.curranpublishing.com, which specializes in preparing mostly non-fiction books for press under subcontract from major publishers. In this capacity she has copy edited, typeset and indexed hundreds of books. For eight years until 2009, CPS had its offices in a redundant medieval church in Norwich, St Mary Coslany. Susan has been also a trustee of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust, which oversees many of Norwich’s redundant churches, since the early 1990s.