He was born in Sankhu, a small town near Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and finished his MA (political science) from Tribhuvan University.

Dr Shrestha has been a Jan Gonda fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden (2001–02), offered to him by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam.

In 2009 he joined the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he has been carrying out research on the Nepalese diaspora in the UK and Belgium.

He has also written and translated a number of literary and research books in his native Nepal Bhasa (Newar language), including the Folk Stories of Sri Lanka.

van den Hoek and Dirk J. Nijland, Bal Gopal Shrestha has also made the award-winning ethnographic documentary Sacrifice of Serpents: The Festival of Indrayani, Kathmandu (Leiden, 1997).