Born in 1960 in Prague as the son of a Russian-Jewish family, he migrated to West Germany with his family in 1970. After studying literature in Hamburg and Munich, he graduated in 1983 with a master's thesis on the Jewish image in Thomas Mann's early works. Educated at the German Journalism School in Munich, Biller's writings were published in Tempo, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and Faces. He became widely known in Germany with his provocative column "100 Lines of Hate" in Tempo. In 2007, two of his stories were published in The New Yorker.