Zhou Wen published her first science fiction short story in high school, and in the decade since she has published nearly a million words. Her works are mainly related to linguistics, brain science, and the internet, often featuring female protagonists.

She won George R. R. Martin’s Terran Prize in 2019 and graduated from the Taos Toolbox Writer Workshop.

Among her works, The Syllables of Silence and Cat Swarm Algorithm won the Best Short Story Award of the China Science Fiction Readers’ Choice Awards (Gravity Awards) in 2018 and 2021 respectively; The Girl with Restrained and Released Life won the Gold Award of the Best Novella category of the Chinese Nebula Awards in 2023. Her works have been selected many times for the Annual Selection of Chinese Science Fiction anthology.

A collection of her short stories, The Girl Who Stole Life (a variant titled as Barriers) was published in China in 2021.

In addition, many of her short stories have been translated into Japanese. The Syllables of Silence, her first published work in Japan, was nominated for the Best Translated Story of Seiun Awards (Japanese Nebula Awards) in 2021.