Gillian Rubinstein was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, but she spent her teenage years in Nigeria and at boarding school. Her father was a chemist; her parents separated when Rubinstein was still young. She read languages at Oxford, and in the early seventies she worked as a freelance journalist and film critic in London. She moved to Australia in 1973 and has been living in South Australia since 1981 with her second husband Philip Eli Rubinstein. The have one son and two daughters together. Gillian Rubinstein has travelled extensively in Japan, and in 1999 she spent a long period there researching her Otori trilogy.