Herman Koch is a Dutch television and radio maker, actor, and writer. He was born in Arnhem and moved with his parents to Amsterdam-Zuid at the age of two. He attended the Montessori Lyceum for his secondary education but was expelled for misconduct. He later studied Russian for a few months and worked on a farm in Finland for a year.

Koch is well-known as a television maker and actor in the TV series Jiskefet, and is also a writer of novels and short stories as well as a columnist for publications like Volkskrant. In 2005, he wrote the Groot Dictee der Nederlandse Taal. He is married to a Spanish woman named Amalia and they have a son named Pablo, born in 1994. Koch has also written under the pseudonym Menno Voorhof.

His literary debut was Red ons, Maria Montanelli in 1989. One of his most famous novels is The Dinner, inspired by the murder of homeless woman María del Rosario Endrinal Petit in Barcelona in 2005. The book won the NS Publieksprijs in 2009 and became a bestseller in the United States in 2013.