Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971. He was kicked out of school at seventeen and started his own publishing company, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen. His first novel, Blue Mondays, written at the age of twenty-three, became a bestseller in Europe, won the Anton Wachter Prize. His second novel, Silent Extras was similarly successful, and Phantom Pain, his third, won the AKO Prize, the Dutch Booker Prize. Writing under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg published The History of My Baldness, which won him the Anton Wachter Prize for the second time, a prize for the best d-but novel of the last two years. He is the only novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. Arnon Grunberg lives in New York City.
