Patrick Roth, born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1953, grew up in Karlsruhe. After studying in Paris and Freiburg, Los Angeles became the adopted home of the English student in 1975, who went on to work as a film journalist, director, and screenwriter in the following years.

In 1978, he produced his first short film, "The Boxer," and in 1981, he attracted attention with his film adaptation of "The Killers," a short story by Charles Bukowski. After producing several radio plays, Roth presented his first work of prose in 1991 with "Riverside," the first installment of a Christ trilogy, which was awarded the Rauriser Literature Prize. This was followed in 1993 by "Johnny Shines oder Die Wiedererweckung der Toten. Seelenrede" (Johnny Shines or The Resurrection of the Dead. Soul Speech), another narrative in which Roth drew on non-canonical biblical texts to great public acclaim. In 1996, the novel "Corpus Christi" followed as the final part of this trilogy.

Roth's stories "Die Nacht der Zeitlosen" (The Night of the Timeless) from 2001 were also highly praised. In 2002, he gave the traditional poetry lectures at the University of Frankfurt am Main ("Ins Tal der Schatten" (Into the Valley of Shadows)). The following year, Roth was awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. In books such as Meine Reise zu Chaplin (My Journey to Chaplin, 1997) and his latest novel, Starlite Terrace (2004), Roth depicts people in the film metropolis of Hollywood in magical images and full of allusions to cinema history, writing himself, according to the jury, "into the front row of German-language literature." In 2005, his Heidelberg poetry lectures were published under the title Zur Stadt am Meer (To the City by the Sea).