Ying Chen left her native Shanghai and settled in Montreal in 1991. Her first novel, La mémoire de l’eau was published by Leméac in 1992. Subsequent novels include the award-winning Les Lettres chinoises (Leméac, 1993); L’ingratitude (Leméac, 1995), Immobile (Boréal, 1998) which won the Prix Alfred-DesRochers 1999), Un enfant à ma porte (Boréal, 2008) and La rive est loin (Boréal, 2013). Chen lives in Vancouver.