Chan Ho-Kei was born and raised in Hong Kong. He has worked as software engineer, scriptwriter, game designer, and editor of comic magazines. His writing career started in 2008 at the age of thirty-three, with the short story “The Case of Jack and the Beanstalk”, which was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award. He went on to win the award again the following year with “The Locked Room of Bluebeard”. In 2011, Chan’s first novel, The Man Who Sold the World, won the Soji Shimada Mystery Award. His subsequent works, including The Borrowed, have been translated into multiple languages, include English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Dutch, Italian,  Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and Hebrew.