Merete Stistrup was born in Hanherred, graduated in French and Danish from Aalborg University presenting a dissertation entitled Kvindesprog. Ouverturer til det orale, 1985, and is a competent language researcher and text analyst.
She has been a Danish lecturer in Lyon and made her literary debut in 1989 with the novel En andens øjne about an adolescent girl forming her identity and her reveries about a mysterious woman-friend. The novel, with its simple, yet sonorous, language, is in a class of its own and, together with prose texts by writers such as Pia Juul, Juliane Preisler, and Jens-Martin Eriksen, heralded the new, linguistically aware prose writing of the 1990s.