Arthur Japin, son of a teacher and detective novelist, experienced a difficult childhood marked by his father's suicide in 1969.

[citation needed] In November 2007, an opera based on the novel premiered in Rotterdam, with an English libretto by Arthur Japin and music by the British composer Jonathan Dove.

Japin was hailed as a great writer after his first couple of novels already, a status confirmed when he was asked to write the 2006 Boekenweekgeschenk: De grote wereld is a novella about a pair of circus-performing dwarves caught in Nazi Germany, which had a record first printing of 813,000 copies.

[citation needed] Japin lives in Utrecht with his publicist Lex Jansen and his partner Benjamin Moser, an American writer.

[6] (except as noted, all published by De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam) Japin has also written several screenplays, radio plays, songs, and theater pieces.