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. In 2007, I was awarded the Wiener Werkstattpreis, and in 2014 the Catalan poetry prize Premi de Poesia Parc Taulí.

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.