Josef Holub was born in Neuern, Bohemia, and lived through the Second World War in his early teens. By his own account, he has earned his living as a smuggler, a mason, a mail carrier, a postal administrator, and a village mayor. He published his first book, a memoir of his own war years, in 1997, when he was sixty-seven. Since then, he has published six more books and has won many awards, including the Peter Hartling Prize for Children's Literature, and the prestigious Zurich Children's Book Prize.