Joakim Philipson was born in 1958 in Stockholm. He pursued undergraduate studies in the history of ideas, philosophy, mathematics, Russian, and Hebrew at the Universities of Umeå, Stockholm, and Uppsala and has published articles on art, philosophy, and medicine in a number of newspapers and magazines. His novel Tecknet och tystnaden (The sign and the silence) was published by Bonniers in 1991. For some years he was a member of the lay council of Stockholm’s biggest synagogue and helped edit the monthly bulletin of Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. He also holds a master’s degree from the Swedish College of Library and Information Science in Borås. In 1996 Bonniers published a second novel by Philipson, Jakobs röst (The voice of Jacob), which received excellent reviews. He worked from 1996 to 2002 in the Rana Division of the National Library of Norway and is currently back in Sweden pursuing Russian studies.