Lars Sund was born in Jakobstad in 1953. After studying at Åbo Akademi, he moved to Uppsala, Sweden in the early 1980s, where he worked as a journalist. He made his literary debut with a poetry anthology in 1974, and published his first novel, Natten är ännu ung (The Night is Yet Young) the following year.

Colorado Avenue was published to great acclaim in 1991, with Sund being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. It was to be the first in a trilogy of novels set in the fictional Ostrobothnian community of Siklax, depicted so vividly that there are regular reports of keen, albeit geographically challenged, readers driving around Ostrobothnia in search of the setting for their favourite books.