Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 in Ruse, a Danube port in Bulgaria, into a family of Sephardic Jewish merchants who spoke Ladino at home. In 1911 the family moved to Manchester, where his father died suddenly the following year; his mother then took the children to Vienna, and later to Zürich and Frankfurt. She taught him German, which became the language of his writing. Returning to Vienna, he took a doctorate in chemistry in 1929 but never practised it, absorbed instead by the city’s literary life and above all by the satirist Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended with fascination.

His only novel, Auto-da-Fé (1935), follows a reclusive sinologist whose world of books is invaded and destroyed; it is a grotesque, claustrophobic study of a mind sealed against reality. After the Anschluss in 1938 Canetti and his wife, the writer Veza Canetti, emigrated to London, and he became a British subject in 1952. For decades he worked on Crowds and Power (1960), a sweeping, unclassifiable inquiry into how masses form and how rulers command them, drawing on myth, anthropology and history rather than on any single theory. Alongside it he kept notebooks of aphorisms, and wrote plays and the travel sketch The Voices of Marrakesh.

Wider recognition came late, with his three-volume autobiography, beginning with The Tongue Set Free (1977), which evokes his polyglot childhood and youth with rare vividness. The Nobel Prize followed in 1981. In his later years he lived mainly in Zürich, where he died in 1994; he is buried there near James Joyce.