She is the second daughter of James Galloway and Janet Clark McBride. Her parents separated when she was four and her father died when she was six. Her sister Nora, sixteen years older, died in 2000. She read Music and English at Glasgow University, then worked as a school teacher for ten years before turning to writing.

She was the first Scottish Arts Council writer in residence to four prisons (HMPs Cornton Vale, Dungavel, Barlinnie and Polmont YOI) and was the Times Literary Supplement Research Fellow to the British Library in 1999. Her awards include: MIND/Allan Lane Award (for The Trick is to Keep Breathing), the McVitie's Prize (for Foreign Parts), the E.M. Forster Award (presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Creative Scotland Award, Saltire Book of the Year (for Clara) and the SMIT non-fiction Book of the Year for This is not about Me.

Janice Galloway currently lives in South Lanarkshire with her son, James, and husband, Jonathan.

She has written and presented three radio series for BBC Scotland (Life as a Man, Imagined Lives and Chopin's Scottish Swansong) and works extensively with musicians and visual artists including Sally Beamish, Anne Bevan, Michael Wolchover, Norman McBeath and Alasdair Nocolson. Her book, Clara was recorded for the RNIB by the author in 2004.

In December 2008 she was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.

Galloway wrote the glosses on Bronte's Shirley and Eliot's Felix Holt and Middlemarch in The Book of Prefaces, edited by Alasdair Gray.

Novels

• The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
• Foreign Parts (1994)
• Clara (2002) (based on the life of Clara Schumann)

Collections of short stories

• Blood (1991)
• Where You Find It (1996)
• "Collected Stories" (2009)

and has been widely anthologised in collections since 1990.

Poetry

• Boy Book See (2002)

Other texts

• This is Not About Me (2008, Memoir)
• Pipelines (2000, prose and poetry text to accompany Anne Bevan's exhibition "undercovered")
• Rosengarten (2004, a book of prose and poetry, matched with an exhibition of obstetrical implements by Anne Bevan)
• Chute (1998, French play/monologue commissioned by the Traverse Theatre)
• Monster (2002, opera libretto for Sally Beamish and Scottish Opera)