Bem Le Hunte was born in Kolkata, the fourth child in a family with an Indian mother and English father. She grew up in India and England, receiving her education at Godolphin and Latymer School in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. She then spent a year studying journalism before continuing on to Cambridge University, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology and a Master of Arts. She subsequently traveled the world, living in Japan and the U.S., where she spent time in Chicago. She then returned to India, living in Delhi and working on short films for the United Nations during the International Decade of Women's Development.

At the age of 25, she moved to Australia and, within a few weeks, was lecturing full time in the Humanities Department of Sydney University. The Seduction of Silence, published after thirteen years of living in her new homeland, hearkens back to her original heritage as she unfolds the story of an Indian family and the monumental changes it undergoes through love and loss over a period of a hundred years. The book's prose was described by Geraldine Brooks as "vivid and arresting" and by Thomas Keneally as "ample and fascinating". However, Anderson Tepper, writing in The New York Times, dismissed it as "full of the airy language of spiriritual gurus" The book achieved wide success, and was published by HarperCollins in U.S. and Australia and by Penguin Group in India. It was translated into Polish under the title, Kusz?ce Wo?anie Ciszy and published by Kameleon. Four years later, in 2006, her second novel, There, Where the Pepper Grows, a tale about a Polish-Jewish family which disembarks in Kolkata while en route to Palestine during World War II, was published internationally by HarperCollins.

Bem Le Hunte lives in Sydney with her husband Jan and sons Taliesin, Rishi and Kashi.