Massum Faryar was born in Afghanistan, where he attended school before emigrating to Germany as a refugee in the 1980s. He studied German language and literature and political science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and received his doctorate in both subjects at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2004. In the 1990s he lived in Hamburg and worked as a social education worker. Since 2002 he lives in Berlin and works as a translator, interpreter, and author.

He discovered his love for literature and poetry while still at school, and since then he has been writing and publishing in his native Farsi language. His translation work includes the translation of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales into the Persian language. He began writing in German in 2007 and has since then published numerous short stories, poems, and a novel entitled Buzkashi or My Mother's Carpet. The novel is about the rise and fall of a merchant family from the West Afghan metropolis of Herat between 1919 and 2009 and gets to the bottom of the culture, history and political situation of the country.

He is currently working on a new novel project; it is an action-packed story of global dimensions, set in several countries and with characters coming from all over the world. The motif 'pandemic' unfolds on several metaphorical levels of meaning.