Pip Adam's work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, The Lumiere Reader, Hue & Cry, Landfall and Blackmail Press. She has also had work appear in publications produced in conjunction with two exhibitions at the City Gallery Wellington and her reviews have appeared in Metro.

Born in Christchurch, Pip moved to Auckland aged three and lived there until the age of 23, at which time she moved to Christchurch to go to the New Zealand Film and Television School. Pip lived in Christchurch for 6 years before a move to Dunedin to continue the degree she had stared in 1991. A final move was to Wellington to complete a Masters in Library and Information Studies at Victoria University. At library school Pip met her husband Brent McIntrye and she and Brent have lived in Wellington ever since. In 2006 Brent and Pip's daughter Tallulah was born and in 2007 Pip attended the Victoria University Institute of Modern Letters where she gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction.

Her first collection of short stories Everything We Hoped For was published by Victoria University Press in 2010 and won the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. She published her first novel, I am working on a building, in 2013.

Pip completed her PhD Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2012. Her thesis asks the question: in what ways can the language of structural engineering inform, alter and enlarge the language of fiction? Pip's aim is to write our relationship with the built environment in ways that highlight the strangeness of surroundings that we normally take for granted in order to amplify what might usually be a muted aspect of fiction. She argues that ‘strangeness' is a useful term since it suggests something of the paradox of a large built form, that it is both manifestly solid and still but also basically a machine for balancing forces that are constantly in motion.

Pip is currently working at Massey University teaching Creative Writing and Creative Non Fiction. She completed a manuscript for a full-length work based on the creative component of her PhD which became her novel I am working on a building, published by Victoria University Press.

Pip was the recipient of an Arts Foundation New Generation Award (2012).

Her first novel I'm Working on a Building was published by VUP in 2013. As well as co-convening the CREW 254, Pip co-convened the MA in Creative Writing with Chris Price in the first half of 2016.

She has taught fiction and creative non-fiction at Massey University and has acted as an external reader for Victoria University and Auckland University’s MA programmes. She has also acted as a mentor for the Whitireia Diploma in Creative writing. As a member of the Write Where You Are Collective, alongside William Brandt, Rajraborti and Gigi Fenster, she teaches at Arohata and Rimutaka Prisons. The Collective members received Corrections Volunteer Awards in 2016 and a Highly Commended Citation in the 2017 Arts Access Corrections Community Awards.

Her most recent novel is The New Animals released in 2017 by Victoria University Press. In 2018, her book won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the 50th Ockham Book Awards.