Bem Le Hunte was born in Calcutta in 1964 to an Indian mother and British father. Her early schooling was undertaken in London, after which she studied Anthropology at Cambridge. Since her graduation she has worked as a writer, university lecturer and advertising copywriter. She also worked in the music industry and for Indian Television before writing fiction.
As an academic, she is known for her work on creative intelligence and across creative industries; in 2019, she was associate professor in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
After emigrating to Australia in the 1990s, Le Hunte left Sydney for the foothills of the Himalayas to write her first novel. A large selection of her encounters and stories from her own family are scattered through the novel. She was awarded an Asialink Centre (University of Melbourne) Fellowship in 2001 for a residency in India.