Markus Frank Zusak is a writer born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He became the youngest of four on January 1, 1975, and years later, he married and had a daughter of his own in 2006. Besides his daughter, Nikita, and his wife, he has two cats. One he named Brutus and the other Bijoux. He studied teaching at a university and became a high school English teacher. Along the way to becoming a writer, he was also a janitor. Since then, he’s written five books. In between his writing, he likes to play on a soccer team and to surf.
However, when he is writing, he gets his inspiration from a multitude of sources. One source is from his favorite books, such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges. The books he read is what inspired him to start writing, because he realized that when you read a book and you don’t even notice that you’re turning the pages is something special and that is what he wanted to do with his life – write books that people couldn’t take their eyes off until they had finished it.
His second source of inspiration is his mother and her life stories of World War II. One of her stories was when she was a child and she saw a group of Jewish people being marched to Dachau. As she saw them marching, she saw great kindness and at the same time, great cruelty. Markus Zusak saw this as the perfect story of how humans really are, and he used this in his description of the road of yellow stars where the houses that had the Star of David painted on them were treated “…almost like lepers.” “At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German terrain.” Another story was of Munich being bombed and the sky seeming to be on fire, just like in the book when Munich was bombed and when Liesel had started her book, writing in it for days on end “Munich was bombed again”. This had how almost everyone dies because of the bombing is almost exactly like his mothers story. Because his mother inspired him so much, he decided to base the main...