Harriett Gilbert was educated at the French Lycée in London and at a succession of boarding schools. She wrote about her early years in "Growing Pains", her contribution to a 1985 collection of autobiographical writing Truth, Dare or Promise. She subsequently went to drama school. On graduating, her first and last acting job was as Mother Elephant in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. She also worked as a nanny, a waitress, an artist's model and a clerk-typist. She took up writing in her twenties.

She nominated A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, first read to her by her father when she was eight, as a life-changing book. The one piece of advice her father, the writer Michael Gilbert, gave her about writing was: "For God's sake, don't use adverbs." Her brother is the Independent journalist Gerard Gilbert.

BroadcasterHarriett Gilbert presents two programmes on BBC World Service radio: the Monday and Friday editions of the daily arts programme The Strand and World Book Club, broadcast on the first Saturday in each month. Guests on the latter have included the Nobel laureates Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, VS Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott.

About presenting for the World Service, she has said, "I think I'm doing the dream job, I just love it, and I can't think of anywhere else I'd like to be".

Gilbert has introduced the World Service arts documentary series Close Up. In 2008 she stood in as presenter of the arts programme The Ticket. She previously presented the World Service's dedicated book programme The Word. Besides this she has presented arts programmes for BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Four television.

Writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen called her "one of the very best presenters of arts programmes on radio or TV" The Financial Times said of her, "the splendid Harriett Gilbert [...] painfully shows up certain would-be arty Radio 4 colleagues".

Literary editorFrom 1983-1988 she was literary editor of The New Statesman and, before that, of City Limits (1981-83). She has also contributed to Time Out, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.

AcademicFrom 1992 she lectured in the Department of Journalism at the City University, London, where until 2008 she was also the programme director of the MA Creative writing (novels) course.

WriterShe is the author of six novels, including Hotels With Empty Rooms and The Riding Mistress. Her non-fiction books include A Women's History of Sex and The Sexual Imagination from Acker to Zola. She scripted the short animated film The Stain (1991) viewable at the Internet Archive.

Although she has not published a novel since 1983 she hopes to return to writing, possibly using her time at City University as inspiration.

At the 2009 Bath Literature Festival, she and the novelist Michèle Roberts discussed "Guilty Pleasures" (Dorothy L. Sayers and Georgette Heyer) as well as the enduring appeal of cross-dressing, duelling, and driving Daimlers.