Fritz Heinz Georg Grün was born in Vienna, Austria on the 14 June 1921 and, in 1936, left Vienna, on the £200 legacy of an uncle, to receive an English education at Herne Bay College. In 1940, during the second world war Gruen, along with a large number of other German Jewish interns from the UK, arrived in Australia on board the Dunera. They were sent to an internment camp at Hay in country New South Wales. After he was released, in 1942, Gruen studied economics part time at the University of Melbourne. He started as a research officer in the New South Wales government Department of Agriculture and worked as an agricultural economist from 1947 until 1959. From 1959 to 1963 he was Senior Research Fellow, Department of Economics at the Australian National University (ANU), later, Professor and Head, Department of Economics, ANU. From 1964 to 1972 Gruen was Professor of Agricultural Economics at Monash University and in 1972 took up the Chair in the Economics Department of the Research School of Social Sciences of the ANU and founded the Centre for Economic Policy Research at the ANU. From 1973 Gruen was a part-time Consultant in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Gruen retired from his position as ANU Chair in 1986 and died in Canberra on 29 October 1997.