Robert Menasse was born in Vienna in 1954 and also grew up there. He studied German, philosophy and political science in Vienna, Salzburg and Messina and received his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis on the "type of outsider in the literary world". Menasse then taught at the University of São Paulo for six years - first as a lecturer for Austrian literature, then as a guest lecturer at the Institute for Literary Theory. There he mainly gave courses on philosophical and aesthetic theories, including: Hegel, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. Since his return from Brazil in 1988, Robert Menasse has lived mainly in Vienna as a writer and cultural-critical essayist.