I was born in Vienna on August 8, 1964. At the time, my mother worked as a hairdresser and my father was employed in business; during the 1970s, he worked as a sales representative and sales manager in the consumer electronics industry. My sister was born in 1969. I attended secondary school in Vienna’s 2nd district for eight years. My first attempts at writing date from this period. I remember writing a short play at the age of twelve, which I rehearsed for a while with school friends but which was never performed. Later, together with my friend Peter Seifert (1963–1994), I submitted prose pieces and poems to literary competitions for young people. I spent much of my free time reading: first science fiction and then world literature. I also developed a love of foreign languages and cultures. In 1981, Peter and I went on a one-month Interrail journey that took us through Italy and the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco, then through France and finally to Denmark. In the years that followed, I traveled several times through France, Italy, Andorra and Catalonia.

After graduating from school and attending a summer university program in Tours, France, I began studying translation with French and Italian in 1982 and completed my degree in 1989. In addition, I studied Romance and German philology from 1983 to 1988 and graduated with the Austrian degree of Magister philosophiae. At the Department of German Studies, I had the opportunity to learn some Yiddish and to become acquainted with Jewish culture. For my degree in Romance philology, I wrote my thesis on the image of the Catalan Countries in French literature from Romanticism to the present; the thesis, entitled L’image des Pays Catalans dans la littérature française à partir du Romantisme, was written in French. Even before graduating, I began working as a freelance translator and specialized in technology, particularly information technology. From 1998 to 2002, I studied European Business Administration and Management at a university of applied sciences, where I also acquired a basic knowledge of Russian.

At the end of the 1980s, I began teaching courses on computer software and writing nonfiction books about office software and computer networks. The first of these books, on the word-processing software WordPerfect, was published in 1989 by Data Becker in Germany and was translated into Dutch a year later. By 2004, I had published nine IT books. My work as a freelance trainer ended in 1996 as a result of unfavorable changes to Austrian social security legislation. Fortunately, that same year I was hired by a multinational IT company for which I had already worked as a trainer. In the fall of 1999, I spent six weeks in North Carolina in the United States, where I co-authored an English-language reference book on PC servers. From 2002 to 2026, I worked as a project manager, mainly on training projects for public-sector clients in Austria. I also continue to offer translation services on a freelance basis.

In the 1990s, I wrote more than one hundred specialist articles for Austrian, German and British IT magazines. With hindsight, I regard this period as an important stage in the development of my literary style. After 2000, I returned to philology, especially Catalan studies, and published articles in academic journals such as the Germany-based Zeitschrift für Katalanistik (Journal of Catalan Studies) and the Austrian Europa Ethnica.

I have four children—three sons and a daughter—with whom I speak exclusively French because bilingual education in German and French has always been important to me.

In 1982, I was awarded the Erster Österreichischer Jugendpreis (Youth Prize) for literature. The winning text, a novella about a young man performing civilian service who gets to know a Jewish pensioner who had been persecuted under the Nazi regime, was published a year later in the German-language Israeli daily newspaper Israel-Nachrichten. The critic Hans Weigel, a member of the literary award jury, was very impressed by the text. In retrospect, I think that this early success turned out to be rather an obstacle to my development as a writer because it gave me a false impression of my abilities at the time. I became a member of the Austrian Writers’ Association in 1986. My novel Nils was awarded another Youth Prize in 1988, although it was never completed; however, its first chapter was published by the Austrian literary magazine Literatur aus Österreich in 1992, and I incorporated some fragments into the diary I had begun in the early 1980s.

After the birth of my first son and as my professional obligations increased, my literary activities had to take a back seat for a while. In the 1990s, I published fiction only sporadically. Nevertheless, I began writing the novel GLUT, two chapters of which were published in the Upper Austrian literary magazine Die Rampe (Der Schreiber von Aram and Das Gesetz). Around 2004, I returned to writing and intensified my literary activities; from then on, I published more stories, essays and poems than ever before. In 2006, I became a member of the Austrian writers’ association Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung, followed by the Catalan Associació d\'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana in 2010 and PEN Català in 2013.

Since 2016, I have lived in Schwechat, close to both Vienna and the airport.