Adams was born in Ryde, a Sydney suburb, the younger of two children. She attended Fort Street Primary School for two years and Sydney Girls High School before going to the University of Sydney from which she graduated with an honours degree in Indonesian.

She was a cousin of Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, but held opposing political views and wanted to become a political journalist. She moved to New York City when she won a scholarship to study at Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism and graduated in 1965. During this time, she met Gordon Adams, a political scientist at Columbia. They married in 1967 and had a daughter, Caitlin, before divorcing.

She worked as a lecturer at a number of tertiary institutions, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, before returning to Australia and the University of Technology, Sydney. Her subject was writing skills and creative writing. She helped design the master of arts writing program at the university, a program which became a model for postgraduate writing programs throughout Australia.

For the rest of her life, she travelled regularly between New York, to see her daughter and teach at Columbia, and Sydney.

On 13 July 2007, Jeremy Fisher, Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, announced that Glenda Adams had died two days previously in Sydney, following a battle with ovarian cancer. Her funeral was held on 18 July.

Adams started writing at the age of 10, with the encouragement of her mother.

While at Columbia University, she joined a fiction workshop and started writing using her real name, having used a male name prior to that to prevent her friends knowing she was writing fiction. Her short stories were published in such magazines as Ms, The Village Voice and Harper's.

After 16 years away, she returned to Australia and became writer-in-residence at the University of Western Australia, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. Her literary friends included Australians Robert Drewe and Kate Grenville (for whom she was also a supervising Associate Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney along with Paula Hamilton for Grenville's Doctorate of Creative Writing in 2006), and the American Grace Paley.

In 1987, her second novel, Dancing on Coral won the Miles Franklin Award and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award but a residential rule for the latter resulted in her being denied it. Instead, the prize money was used for a fellowship for a young writer and she was compensated with a special award (with no money attached). Her third novel, Longleg, published in 1990, was also an award-winner. Her fourth novel, The Tempest of Clemenza was published in both Australia and the USA in 1996, and in 1998, her play, The Monkey Trap, was performed at the Griffin Theatre, in Sydney.

Novels

• Games of the Strong (1982)
• Dancing on Coral (1987)
• Longleg (1990)
• The Tempest of Clemenza (1996)

Short Story Collections

• Lies and Stories (1976)
• The Hottest Night of the Century (1979) review July 30, 1989

Scripts

• Pride (1993)
• Wrath (1993)
• The Monkey Trap commissioned by Griffin Theatre, Sydney (1998)