Benjamín Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 and grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires, and Lima before settling in Santiago, Chile, at age fourteen. He writes in Spanish, and his work has been translated widely. His earlier short story collection, La Antártica empieza aquí, won the Premio Caza de Letras in Mexico and the Santiago Municipal Literature Award.
His international breakthrough came with When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book that blurs fiction and nonfiction to explore the personal costs of scientific discovery. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. The MANIAC (2023) followed, centering on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann and tracing the arc from pure science to the creation of the atomic bomb and artificial intelligence. Both books ask what happens when human understanding pushes past its own limits.