Shen Fuyu was born in Jiangsu, China in 1970. At the age of 18, 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 20 years. Having published more than a dozen books, Shen is a full-time writer now and lives in Paris.