Benjamín Labatut was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1980. He grew up in The Hague and then settled in Santiago, Chile.
Labatut is the author of Antarctica Starts Here (2010), a collection of short stories, After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical and historical notes on the void, and The Stone of Madness (2021), a book of essays. His book When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) became a literary phenomenon, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. It has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
His subsequent novel, The MANIAC (2023), traces a path from the foundations of mathematics to the delusions of artificial intelligence by revisiting the legacy of one of the most brilliant minds of contemporary science, the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. Spanish director Calixto Bieito adapted the novel for the Pfauen.
