Castellanos Moya was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, the country where he was his mother, but at four years of age the family moved to El Salvador, the homeland of his father. There he completed his primary and secondary studies at the Marist Liceo Salvadoreño in the capital and then went on to study literature at the University of El Salvador, but in 1979 he left and went abroad, first to York University in Toronto, Canada and , later, to Costa Rica (1980) and Mexico (1981-1992). In Mexico, he worked as a journalist in the Salvadoran Press Agency (Salpress) during the civil war in El Salvador (a country he returned to for a brief period in 1991 with the failed project to start a magazine) and was the editor of the newspapers El día and Excelsior, as well as correspondent for the Hispanic newspaper La Opinión in Los Angeles, California. It was during his stay in that country that he wrote his first novel, La Diaspora, which in 1988 won the award granted by the Central American University "José Simeón Cañas". In 1992 El Salvador returns again, but in 1999 he moved to Spain: after the publication of his novel El Asco: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (1997), his mother received death threats directed against Castellanos due to the content with which he deals some sensitive issues, in 2001 he returned to reside in Mexico City. Between 2004 and 2006 he lived in Frankfurt, for the invitation of the Cities of Asylum program in that city and during 2009 he was a guest researcher at the University of Tokyo. He resides in the United States, where he teaches at the University of Iowa and is a regular columnist for the magazine Sampsonia Way Magazine. He has been distinguished with important awards, such as the Ibero-American Narrative Manuel Rojas, 4 and has been a member of literary juries, such as the I Concurso Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez (2014)