His father was writer and journalist, Wilhelm Emanuel Süskind, who worked for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and was the co-author of the well-known publication Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (From the Dictionary of an Inhuman), a critical collection of essays concerning the language of the Nazi era.
[1] Funded by his parents, he relocated to Paris, where he wrote "mainly short, unpublished fiction and longer screenplays which were not made into films".
During the 1980s, working with the director Helmut Dietl, Süskind was also successful as a screenwriter for the television productions Monaco Franze (1983) and Kir Royal (1987), among others.
Perfume was on the bestselling list of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel for nine years, has been translated into 49 languages and as of 2019[update] has worldwide sales of more than 20 million copies.
[1][2] Süskind lives a reclusive, private lifestyle and divides his time between Munich and France.