She was the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother (Monique Caulle) and English Protestant father (Reginald Roberts), and has dual United Kingdom–France nationality. Roberts was born to a French Catholic mother and English Protestant father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, but raised in Edgware, Middlesex.
She was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith. She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian.
She worked for the British Council in Bangkok, Thailand, in this role from 1973 to 1974. At this time Roberts was the Editor (1975-1977) at Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, and later at City Limits (1981-1983). Her first novel, A Piece of the Night, was published in 1978.
Michèle Roberts is an Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and was Visiting Professor in Writing at Nottingham Trent University for several years.
And the friendships she made and has kept ever since, notably with fellow feminist writers such as Sara Maitland, Micheline Wandor and Alison Fellow Her exploration of London, the various areas and houses that she lived in, went alongside her development as a writer
Foreign her, writing ‘meant voyaging into the unknown and having adventures’ though also ‘bearing witness to other people’s stories as well as my own’.".
Active in socialist and feminist politics (the Women"s Liberation Movement) since the early 1970s, she formed a writers" collective with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns. She is a Chevalier de l"Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French government, but has turned down an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire as a consequence of her republican views. Paper Houses, a memoir of her life since 1970, was published in 2007: "Drawing on her diaries of the period, she brings back a more political, though also hedonistic era of radical feminism, communes and demonstrations.
