Daniel Kehlmann

Kehlmann was born in Munich to a theater-director father and grew up mostly in Vienna after his family relocated there in 1981, studying philosophy and German literature at the University of Vienna before publishing several early, little-noticed novels through his twenties.

Measuring the World (2005) paired the reclusive, ill-tempered mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss with the restless explorer Alexander von Humboldt, cutting between Gauss's provincial life of calculation and Humboldt's continent-spanning expeditions to comic, melancholy effect; it became the best-selling German-language novel in decades, translated into over forty languages.

He has continued mixing historical material with metafictional play, including Tyll, a Thirty Years' War tale narrated partly by its trickster-jester hero, and F, a contemporary novel of three brothers and a con-artist father; he now divides his time between Berlin and New York.