Daughter to Jewish refugees, scientist Zacharias Dische and doctor Maria Renate Dische. Dische was born and raised in the Washington Heights district of New York City. As a teenager, she fled the regime of her stepfather Sig, only to end up in Libya during Col. Gaddafi's revolution. From there, Dische backpacked to Kenya, where she worked for famed paleontologist Louis Leakey. She returned to the United States in 1972. Back in her home country, she enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in Literature and Anthropology. After graduation, Dische worked as a freelance journalist, publishing in The New Yorker and The Nation. In the early 1980s, Dische moved to Berlin, Germany, a place where she still spends a considerable amount of time.

In 1986, Dische produced the documentary film Zacharias (1986). The film was based on her own script about her father, a Jew from Lemberg, who — having grown up in Vienna — fled to America through France to become one of the most distinguished biochemists of his generation. It was broadcast on the ZDF.

In 1989, Dische published her first novel Pious Secrets. The book became a Bestseller throughout Europe, and ended up being translated into 15 languages. In 1993, Dische made her first appearance as a children's author alongside co-writer Magnus Enzensberger, publishing Esterhazy, the tale of a hare searching for love in the Berlin of the late 1980s. Her next children's book, Zwischen zwei Scheiben Glück (1997; Eng. Between Two Seasons of Happiness, 1998) tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who, following Kristallnacht, was sent into exile by his father, to stay with his seemingly stern grandfather in Hungary. The novel was awarded the German Young People's Literature Award and was also released as an audio book. Dische's most recent novel was also her most successful one. "The Empress of Weehawken", Dische's autobiography told from the point of view of her grandmother, was released in 2005 to significant critical acclaim.

This book does a number of things beautifully, even brilliantly. It looks at the America of the 1950s and 1960s from a European refugee's point of view, in all the infant superpower's naivete, self-importance and glistening material success, as the refugees struggle to make the dream work for them too. It explains how life can appear to a person who is both a believer and a painfully practical realist. It also shows how character is inherited yet subtly altered over the generations.

The real grandeur of The Empress of Weehawken, however, lies in the narrator's voice. Pure as a bell, always unerringly true to character, Frau Rother is drawn as accurately as the slice of a surgeon's scalpel. And that's what the author is doing here, performing autopsies on the characters of her family. The writer is the real medical examiner.

The book was also a notable commercial success, selling over half a million copies in Germany alone. In 2007, she released a collection of short stories, entitled Loves.

Dische was detained at the Republican National Convention in 2004.

Author Irene Dische was covering the Bush speech for the German paper Die Zeit. Dische said she was sitting in the press stands with the artist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman when police removed them both from the press stands and questioned them about their T-shirts. Spiegelman's T-shirt said "Pray for a secular society"; Dische's featured the word "Bush" and Chinese characters. She convinced police it said, "I love Bush" (it meant shit on Bush and flush him away) and was allowed to return to her seat. On her way back, an usher handed her an American flag and told her to wave it. When she refused to take it, she "immediately felt a hand on my shoulders", and police quickly ushered her off the convention floor and into a station set up inside the Garden. They called immigration officials to check on her American status and questioned her for over an hour. She also persuaded them to Google her on the Internet to prove that she was a legitimate writer. When she called her daughter, Emily, and spoke to her in German, one detective barked, "You don't speak in a language we can't understand here." Finally she was escorted to the street, with the police, Dische said, "trying to make nice the whole way."

In 2008 her book The Job was made into the German television movie, Ein Job starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Personal life

Dische is a compulsive traveler, who divides her time between Berlin and New York. She is married to lawyer Nicolas Becker, and has two children, Emma and Leonard.