Author Arnon Yasha Yves Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971. He lives and works in New York City.

Grunberg was kicked out of high school at age seventeen. He started his own publishing company called Kasimir, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen, acted and wrote plays. 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.