Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Leuven. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry. In 1885, Giraud became a member of La Jeune Belgique, a Belgian nationalist literary movement that met at the Café Sésino in Brussels.^[1] Giraud became chief librarian at the Belgian Ministry of the Interior.

He was a Symbolist poet. His published works include Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques (1884), a poem cycle based on the commedia dell'arte figure of Pierrot, and La Guirlande des Dieux (1910). The composer Arnold Schönberg set a German-language version (translated by Otto Erich Hartleben) of selections from his Pierrot Lunaire to innovative atonal music. In a different, late romantic style, some of Hartleben's translations found their way into the vocal works of Joseph Marx.

• Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques (1884)
• Hors du Siècle (poems written between 1885 and 1897)
• Le concert dans la musée (1921)
• Le Miroir caché (sonnets) (1921)

• Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, translated and with an introduction by Gregory C. Richter, Truman State University Press, 2001.
• Albert Giraud, "Pierrot Lunaire," Schoenberg's selection, translated by Cecil Gray http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/music/pierrot/pierrot.pdf Archived 15 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine.
• Albert Giraud, Le Miroir caché, Éditions de la Vie Intellectuelle, Bruxelles, 1921.
• Arnold Schoenberg, "Complete performance: Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire," Ricardo Muti & Chicago SO, recorded February 2012, with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2cBUJmDr8.