Eduardo Chirinos was born in Lima, Peru, on April 4, 1960. He studied at the Faculty of Humanities of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. He belonged to the so-called Generation of 1980, along with poets such as José Antonio Mazzotti, Rossella Di Paolo and Raúl Mendizábal. In 1986 he traveled to Spain on a scholarship from the Ibero-American Cooperation Institute (1986). He was a cultural journalist and professor of literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 1993 he traveled to the United States to complete his studies at Rutgers University (New Jersey), where he obtained his doctorate.

In 1981 he published his first collection of poems: Cuadernos de Horacio Morell, which was followed by: Crónicas de un o idico (1983), Fingerprint Archive (Copé Prize 1984). In 1998 he published his thesis: La morada del silencio (1998).
He was professor of Hispanic American literature at Binghamton University (1999), the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2000), and the University of Montana (2000-2016).
He died in February 2016, in Missoula, United States, a victim of cancer.