In 2016, Kurniawan became the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

[2] Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, and grew up in a small coastal town, Pangandaran.

His novel Beauty Is a Wound was included in the list of 100 notable books by The New York Times.

Kurniawan has insisted that Beauty Is a Wound is neither a historical novel nor a book about Indonesian history.

Kurniawan's style of "approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour" also draws comparisons to Haruki Murakami.