In 1940, when Appelfeld was eight years old, the Nazis invaded his hometown and his mother was killed. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet Army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it.

In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today, Appelfeld lives in Mevaseret Zion and teaches literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Aharon Appelfeld is one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue is German, but he also speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, English and Italian. With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery.

Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir. In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he said he agonized over it, because it was written in Mishnaic Hebrew and he had to look up every word in the dictionary.

Many Holocaust survivors have written an autobiographical account of their survival, but Appelfeld does not offer a realistic depiction of the events. He writes short stories that can be interpreted in a metaphoric way. Instead of his personal experience, he sometimes evokes the Holocaust without even relating to it directly. His style is clear and precise, but also very modernistic.

Appelfeld resides in Israel but writes little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. As an orphan from a young age, the search for a mother figure is central to his work. During the Holocaust he was separated from his father, and only met him again twenty years later.

Silence, muteness and stuttering are motifs that run through much of Appelfeld's work. Disability becomes a source of strength and power.

Appelfeld's novels have won critical and popular acclaim. In 1979, he was the co-recipient (jointly with Avot Yeshurun) of the Bialik Prize for literature. In 1983, he was awarded the Israel Prize, for literature.

Among his better-known works are Badenheim 1939 (ISBN 0-87923-799-6) and The Immortal Bartfuss (ISBN 0-8021-3358-4) which won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1989. Appelfeld's autobiography, A Memoir (2003, ISBN 0-8052-4178-7), won France's Prix Médicis. The German city of Dortmund awarded Appelfeld the Nelly Sachs Prize in 2005.

• In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem.

Appelfeld's work is greatly admired by his friend, fellow Jewish novelist Philip Roth, who made the Israeli writer a character in his own novel Operation Shylock.