Arnon Grunberg

Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971, was kicked out of school at age seventeen, and started his own publishing company two years later. At age twenty-three, he published his first novel, Blue Mondays, which was a European bestseller and won the Anton Wachter Prize for debut fiction. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Two of his novels, Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker, won the AKO Literature Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. Writing under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt, he published The Story of My Baldness, which also won the Anton Wachter Prize, making Grunberg the only novelist to have won it twice. Grunberg writes columns, book reviews, and essays for various Dutch and Belgian newspapers and magazines and a blog for the literary magazine Words without Borders. His most recent novel is The Jewish Messiah.