Born in Santander in 1965, Jesús Ruiz Mantilla has a degree in Information Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid and has worked in the newspaper El País since 1992, publishing about music, film and books in the culture section and in the Babelia supplement. He has also been a collaborator of the program La ventana.

His novels, on various topics such as music, painting or related to gastronomy, are characterized by having a journalistic language, with minimalist descriptions of location and environment.

Ruiz Mantilla's first work, Los ojos no ven, dealt with the enigmas of Dalí's world. Of other prominent personalities he speaks in his books Prelude or I, Farinelli, the capon.