Born in 1958 in Tsarskoe Selo / Pushkin, Leningrad region, Sergey Zavyalov graduated from the Department of Classical Philology at Leningrad University. He was a member of Club 81, an oppositional writers' organisation in the 1980s, and was published in the magazines of the Leningrad samizdat.
In the 1990s, he taught Latin, Ancient Greek and Classical literature at St. Petersburg universities, gave special courses on the history of unofficial literature at the university.
Between 2004 and 2011 he lived in Finland, from 2011 onwards in Switzerland, where he gives lecture courses on the history of Soviet poetry at the University of Zurich.
He is the author of six poetry books in Russian, most recently Stihotvoreniya i poemy 1993–2017 (Collected Poems 1993-2017). Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye / New Literary Observer, 2018, published several books of essays and has eight books translated into foreign languages.
He is the winner of the Andrey Bely Prize (2015) and Premio Ceppo Internazionale Piero Bigongiari (2016).