Eugen Ruge was born in 1954 in Soswa, in Western Siberia, and came to East Berlin with his parents in 1956.
After studying maths, he worked at the Central Institute for Geophysics at the GDR Academy of Sciences from 1980 to 1985.
He then began to write, at first mainly plays and radio plays. In early 1989, he fled to the Federal Republic. In 2011 he published the novel “In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts” (In Times of Decreasing Light), which won the Döblin Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Aspekte Literature Prize.
He later published “Cabo de Gata”, “Follower” and, in 2019, the novel “Metropol”.
He shares his time between Berlin and the island of Rügen.