Holland’s most famous and bestselling author, Marcel Möring, was born in 1957 in Enschede, an industrial town near the Dutch-German border, where he attended a Montessori primary school. In the late 1960s his family moved north, to Assen, a small town moderately famous for its annual TT motor races. He finished secondary school and studied Dutch literature for two years, then went from one odd job to another. Since he had already decided to become a writer at the age of thirteen, he saw no point in further education. He wrote several plays in those years, producing and directing two of them, and moved with his girlfriend to Rotterdam, the second biggest city in the Netherlands and the largest harbour in the world.
Möring published his first novel, Mendels Erfenis, in 1990, to almost unanimous critical acclaim. His second novel, Het Grote Verlangen (The Great Longing ) won the AKO Prize – the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. Over 100,000 copies of The Great Longing have been sold in the Netherlands alone. Möring’s third book was a novella: Bederf is de weg van alle vlees (Decay is the Way of All Flesh). His latest book is a 500-page novel: In Babylon. This book won two Golden Owls, a Flemish award for the best Dutch/Flemish book of 1998 and was a major success in both the Netherlands and Germany before being published in the UK. Dream Room was published in 2002.
