Ruiz Zafón was born in the city of Barcelona. Growing up in Spain, he began his work life by making money in advertising. His grandparents had worked in a factory and his father sold insurance.  In the 1990s Ruiz Zafón moved to Los Angeles where he worked briefly in screen writing. Catalan by birth and also fluent in English, he writes and publishes his novels in Spanish. This not only enables a larger readership, via readers in Spain and South America, but also allows his novels to speak more widely for the country of Spain, in a way that novels written in Catalan or English would not.