Valery Posternak was born in 1962 in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. He graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Theatre School.

He is the founder of the band Colney Hatch, with which he recorded two English-language albums in the mid-1990s. He pursued a career in music journalism. From 2006 to 2008, Posternak served as editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Billboard.

Since 2014, he has no longer published his work in Russian.

Written in Ukrainian, his mother tongue, Burn Burn the Dead Tree is Posternak’s debut in prose. He has lived in Cyprus since early 2022.