Paula Pimenta was born in Belo Horizonte, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. As a child she showed an aptitude for writing, which led her to choose a career in journalism; two years after starting that, she switched to advertising. After college she moved to London, where she studied creative writing and wrote her first novel, Fazendo meu filme. Returning to Brazil, she worked in marketing and as a music teacher until becoming a full-time writer.

   Her first book, a collection of poems titled Confissão, was released in 2001, but success came in 2008, when word of mouth among her fans transformed the teen novel Making My Movie into a best seller. It tells the sequence of adventures of the young Estefânia Castelino Belluz, Fani, the main character of the novel. Three other books followed. Together, the four books have already sold 500,000 copies. The series was published in Spain, Portugal and all of Latin America and also has a comics version that already has two volumes.

   Pimenta was chosen by Época magazine as one of the 100 most influential Brazilians in 2012 and, in 2014, she was the top-selling author in Brazil, according to a ranking by PublishNews.

   The number of sales of her works, as of September 2015, exceeded 980,000 copies. Pimenta has constant contact with young people through social networks: on Twitter she has more than 37,000 followers, and on Facebook over 34,000.