Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971, and was kicked out of high school at age seventeen. He started his own publishing company, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen. When he was only twenty-three years old, his first novel Blue Mondays became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. It has been translated in thirteen languages.
His novel Silent Extras was published in 1997 and has sold more than 100,000 copies.
In 1998 he wrote the novel Saint Anthony for the Dutch "Week of the Books"?. 701,000 copies were published. His collection of essays entitled The Comfort of Slapstick was published the same year.
Grunberg's novel, Phantom Pain, was published in 2000 and went on to win the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. The English translation of this novel was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005.
His first screenplay, The Fourteenth Chicken, was released as a movie in the fall of 1998, coinciding with the premiere of You Are Also Very Attractive When You Are Dead, a play Grunberg wrote for German and Israeli actors and which has been performed in Düsseldorf and Tel Aviv.
Grunberg was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam and the publishing house Athenaeum, Polak & van Gennep to write a contemporary version of Erasmus' In Praise of Folly. This book, In Praise of Mankind, came out in 2001 and won the Golden Owl Award for the best book of last year. 2001 also saw the publication of Amuse-Bouche, a collection of his short stories.
Under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg wrote the novel The Story of My Baldness, for which he won for the second time the Anton Wachter Prize, a prize for the best debut novel of the last two years. He became the first novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. The Story of My Baldness won in Germany the Aspekte Prize.
Again under the name Marek van der Jagt, in 2002, Grunberg published the essay, Monogamous, the essay chosen this year for the "Week of the Books"?. Another Marek van der Jagt work, the novel Gstaad 95-98, was published in 2002 and was introduced by Arnon Grunberg in May in Vienna.
In 2002 Grunberg won the German NRW Literature Prize for all his books translated into German, including those by Marek van der Jagt.
In 2003 his novel The Asylum Seeker was published in the Netherlands and hailed as his best novel to date.
In 2004 he published a collection of short stories and a novella. September 2004 his novel The Jewish Messiah was published in the Netherlands.
In 2004 he won the prestigious Bordewijk Prize for The Asylum Seeker.
Also he won for this novel for the second time the AKO Prize, the only author till now to win this price twice.
From September 2004 till November 2005 he was the anchorman for the weekly Dutch cultural TV show R.A.M.
In 2005 The Jewish Messiah was on the shortlist of both the Golden Owl and the AKO prize.
In the spring of 2005 he gave a master class at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, on "the technique of suffering"?.
Fall 2005 The Technique of Suffering was published. The book contains his lectures and the machines that the students built under his supervision.
Also in 2005 The Grunberg-bible was published, the best from the Old and the New Testament according to Grunberg.
In the same year he edited a collection of stories from Eastern Europe, Fear defeats everything.
In September 2006 his latest novel, Tirza, was published.
His work has been translated into twenty different languages.
Grunberg was raised in Amsterdam and currently lives in New York City. He writes travel columns, book reviews and essays for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, and a weekly column for the Belgian magazine Humo, the Dutch magazine VPRO-gids and the Dutch newspaper Het Parool.
He contributes widely to magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Tages-Anzeiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bookforum..