Anthony Marais was born in Hollywood, California in 1966. During the 1980s he co-founded a Los Angeles pop-group called “The Squids,” before heading to Paris to study art history and language at the Sorbonne. Later, he studied anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, focusing on the prehistory of Polynesia; and then at Simon Fraser University in Canada where he holds a Master’s Degree in Archaeology and wrote a thesis on fortifications in Tonga. In Paris he lived next to Notre Dame, near the Marais quarter, during which time he saw Jean Marais perform on stage and discovered the music of Marin Marais. While at Berkeley, he lived in The Carlton Hotel on the corner of Telegraph and Durant and became a devotee of the clown/activist Stoney Burke.

During his years as an archaeologist he traveled extensively throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. In 1991, while living on Guam, he played bass guitar for the Chamorro singer/songwriter Maria Yatar. As payment for his services he was given a traditional Micronesian tattoo applied by hand which took ten hours (he won't tell you where).

In 1995, he became a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (“The Magic Castle”) in Hollywood. Then, during a visit to Wiesbaden, Germany, he read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and, at the age of 29, decided to write a novel of his own.

In his own words: “There is a moment in the career of an archaeologist when he realizes that, in light of the millennia which make up his daily vernacular, the, optimistically speaking, 85 years which has been allotted him are indeed a flash in the pan.” Since this time, he has been living in Germany where today he teaches screenwriting and is an active part of cinema and literary communities.