Erwan Larher was born in central France and attended the prestigious Sciences Po university. He left the music business after 15 years to write full-time; his first novel was published in 2010, and his third, The Male Abandoned in a Hostile Environment (2013), won the Claude-Chabrol and the Louis-Barthou literary awards. Larher was shot in the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan Theater, and was lucky to escape with his life; he finished his fourth novel, Margaret Doesn't Like Her Bum, while recovering in hospital. His deeply moving account of this event, The Book I Didn't Want to Write, appeared in France in August 2017 and was an immediate critical and popular hit; it has since sold tens of thousands of copies.