Born on 27 January 1966 in Videniškiai, Molėtai district, Lithuania. Debuted as a poet in 1994 in the anthology Svetimi. He has published three books of poetry and three books of prose. His work has been awarded several literary prizes.

In 2012, his novel My Name is Marytė (In the Shadow of Wolves) was voted Book of the Year in Lithuania and received the Lithuanian Writers' Union Award. In 2016, he was nominated for Poland's prestigious Angelus Literary Award. In 2018, it received the Georg Dehio Prize in Berlin, as well as being named among the best books of 2019 by the British newspaper The Times. In 2020, the US magazine World Literature Today included his outstanding novel in its list of the most important literary translations into English in 2019 (the list includes 75 books in total). 

His poems and short prose have been published in anthologies and magazines abroad: in English, Slovenian, Latvian, Estonian, Swedish, Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, Italian, Hungarian, German, Dutch and Russian. Collections of short stories by Alvydas Šlepikas have appeared in Belarus and Germany.