Sheng Keyi was born in Yiyang, Hunan province, in the 1970s. She settled in Shenzhen during the 1990s before moving to Dongbei in 2001. In 2002 she began her career as an author and she received the Most Promising New Writer Award in 2003. She has published six novels, two of which have been translated into English: Northern Girls and Death Fugue. She was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012.