A native New Yorker, Siegel was born, raised, and educated on Manhattan. While in high school, he began the study of both Japanese and judo, becoming fluent in the former and a champion in the later. For his undergraduate education, he attended Harvard University, where he majored in East Asian studies and spent his junior year in Tokyo. He returned to Japan following graduation and studied on a Mombusho Fellowship. In the early 1990s, he studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop where he received his MFA. The year after that, he was in Provincetown, Massachusetts on a writing fellowship.

In 1997, his first novel All the Money in the World was published. This was followed in 2007 by his second, All Will Be Revealed.

• All Will Be Revealed, Macadam Cage Pub, 2008, ISBN 978-1596922853
• All the Money in the World, Random House, 1997, ISBN 978-0517316887

Short Stories

• "The Magic Box," Post Road Magazine, 2006