Kei Aono was born in 1959 in Nagoya, Japan and studied at Tokyo Art university. After starting her career at an anime magazine, she worked as an fiction editor at a publishing company. In 2006 she made her novel debut with The Reason I Won't Quit, and in 2014 Bookstore Girls won the Grand Prize in the "Book I want made into a movie" category at the Shizuoka Bookstore Awards.