Elias Canetti was born in Ruse (Rustschuk), Bulgaria, into a Sephardi Jewish family. His mother tongue was Ladino. In 1911 the family immigrated to Manchester, England. Following the untimely death of his father in 1912, his mother moved with her three small sons to Vienna. Elias Canetti attended the Realgymnasium in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1916 to 1921. His first literary work, Junius Brutus, was produced in Zurich. In 1921 the family settled in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, where Elias Canetti graduated the upper secondary school in 1924. In the same year he returned to Vienna and started to study chemistry at the University of Vienna earning a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1929.
In Vienna Canetti was strongly influenced by various literary circles, especially by the writer and critic Karl Kraus. Consequently his primary interest turned to literature, and his first outline for a book was about crowd psychology (1925). The burning down of the Palace of Justice of Vienna by angry protesters in 1927, had a major impact on his future works. Most of them focus on problems of the masses, power, death, and human madness.
In 1928-1929 Elias traveled to Berlin, where he met various influential artists and intellectuals, including Isaak Babel, Bertold Brecht and George Grosz. In 1930, Canetti started to work on his novel Die Blendung that was published in 1935, in 1932 he published his play Hochzeit (“The Marriage”) and in 1934 Komodie der Eitelkeit (‘The Comedy of Vanity”). In the 1930s Canetti translated works by the American writer Upton Sinclair into German.
Following the Anschluss in 1938, Canetti fled with his wife Venetia (Veza) Taubner-Calderon (1897-1963) to Paris, and a year later they immigrated to England. Elias Canetti lived most of his life in London, nevertheless he continued to write in German and did not actively associate with English writers, or with other German language colleagues.
In 1941 Canetti was a co-signer of Declaration of Austrian Organization in the UK. In 1946 C. V. Wedgwood published his Auto-da-Fe, the English translation of Die Blendung.
In 1956 the premiere of his play Die Befristeten (‘Their Days are Numbered’) took place in Oxford. His Aufzeichnungen 1942-1948 (“Sketches”) were published in 1965. As a writer, Canetti did not draw much attention until his best-known work Masse und Macht was published in Hamburg in 1960, and appeared in English as “Crowds and Power” in 1962.
Canetti was a member of Academy of Arts, Berlin, and the Bavarian Academy of fine Arts; he received Prix International; Literary Prize from the City of Vienna (1966); Grosser Oesterreichisher Staatspreis (1968); Georg Buechner Prize (1977), and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
Canetti’s literary production include Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (1968) (‘The Voices from Marrakesh’, English tr. 1978); Der Andere Process. Kafkas Briefe an Felice (1969) (“Kafka’s Other Trial”, tr. 1974); Die Provinz des Menschen. Aufzeichnungen 1942-1972 (1973) (“The Human Province”, 1978); Der Ohrenzeuge, Funfzig Charaktere (1974) (“Ear Witness: Fifty Characters”, tr. 1979); Das Gewissen der Wort. Essays (1975) (“The Conscience of Words”); Die Gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend (“The Tongue Set Free” tr. 1979); Die Fackel in Ohr. Lebensgeschichte 1921-1931 (1980) (‘The Torch in my Ear, tr. 1982); Das Augenspiel. Lebensgeschichte 1931-1937 (1985) (‘The Plat of the Eyes”, 1990); Das Geheimhen der Uhr. Aufzeichnungen 1973-1985 (1987) (“The Secret Heart of the Clock”, tr. 1989); Die Fliegenpein, Aufzeichnungen (1992) (“Pain of Flies: Notes”).