Giles Griffin was born in 1962 in Kent, UK. Giles is a gay white male who likes food, wine, water and books. He was brought up mostly in the Midlands of England, spending his early working life in London and the past 30 years in Cape Town. During this time, he worked as a copywriter for a variety of advertising agencies and for Triangle Project, whose focus is LGBTIA+ health. He co-facilitates ‘A Pack of Wild Queers’ – a community space for queer people to share their creative work. He is moved by “nature, mothers, unspoken emotion, unjust oppression, a finely turned bicep and creativity – in particular, gastronomic and literary innovation.”
“Gone viral”, whose opening passage appears in the Life Righting Collective’s first anthology, “This is how it is”, is a personal and public poetic eulogy – both for those who have gone before and those who have survived the HIV pandemic. He only took to writing poetry after getting involved with the LRC and calls himself ‘an unexpected poet’. His love of food and experience of loss, in several forms, has prompted him to create two LRC courses: “Edible Memoirs: Writing the Plate, Digesting our Memories” and “Lost/Found: Facing our Losses, Writing our Healing.”
Something you don’t know about Giles: one of his maternal great aunts became his paternal step-grandmother: food for thought for family constellations, complicated bereavement and writing alike!