Maurice Brand was born in Landgraaf, in the south of the Netherlands, in 1985, and now lives in Bangkok. As a child, he disappeared into genre fiction; in his thirties, he came to literary fiction and the novels that refused easy answers. They are the ones he now writes.
Before fiction, there was business. For more than a decade, Maurice built, ran, and sold companies: a web design studio, an online marketing agency, and an e-commerce platform selling weight loss formulas. The entrepreneurial years taught him discipline and how to finish what he started, useful habits for anyone who would later focus on writing novels.
He writes literary fiction with a streak of psychological surrealism, circling grief, the impossibility of ever making the right choice, and the quiet absurdity of being a person at all. His work is shaped as much by Carl Jung as by any novelist: by the shadow we disown and the masks we mistake for our face. Among the writers he returns to are Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and George Orwell.
A handful of short stories can be read here on this website, and his future debut novel, Hard Mints, is a work in progress.
Maurice has lived in Bangkok since 2016, where he lives with his teen daughter. When he isn't writing, he lifts weights, swims, and walks the city. He is reliably comfortable facing down a big plate of grilled sirloin or a sushi banquet.