José Manuel Pozo López was born in Alameda, Andalusia, Spain. He holds a BA in Translation and Interpretation (French, English, and Italian) from the University of Malaga.​ He spent his third year of his undergraduate degree studying in the Institut Libre Marie Haps (Catholic University of Louvain) as part of the Erasmus exchange program. He holds an MA in Translation, also from the University of Malaga. He specialized in literary translation, and his MA thesis consisted of a commented translation of an anthology of poems by the Belgian Symbolist writer Emile Verhaeren.