Shen Fuyu was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1970. At the age of eighteen, he left home and drifted around the country, taking up a variety of jobs—porter, clerk, and schoolteacher—and began his writing career. He graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Nanjing University in 1996, and has been working as a journalist for twenty years. Having published more than a dozen books, Shen is a full-time writer now and lives in Paris.