Jean-Louis Adorsen was born in 1949 in Allauch, a French commune situated east of Marseille, and migrated to Norway in 1954. After finishing his military service, he worked at Aftenposten and Schibsted for 43 years, initially as a typesetter and typographer, and then for the final 20 years as an IT consultant and programmer. In high school, he began writing and had his first short story published in a magazine in 1968. He occasionally wrote short stories and magazine novels in his leisure time but was more interested in making short films and taking photographs. After retiring in 2013, Jean-Louis began writing full-time and has published three thriller novels, Høstmørke (Autumn Darkness, 2017), Engelen Gabriel (An Angel Named Gabriel, 2019), and Selma (2025), as well as two collections of short stories. An Angel Named Gabriel is his first book translated to English.

With his background as a former typographer, Jean-Louis possesses the skills to personally format his own books for printing. In addition, over the past few years, he has formatted eighteen books for other authors as well, and has made e-book versions of some of them, too: