Gu Byeong-mo was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1976. She made her literary debut in 2009 when her novel Wizard Bakery won the second Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Her 2015 short-story collection Geugeosi namaneun anigireul received the Today's Writer Award and Hwang Sun-won New Writers' Award. This is her third novel, and the first to be translated into the English language.
