Elias Canetti

Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family that spoke Ladino at home; his father's early death sent the family moving repeatedly (Manchester, Vienna, Zurich, Frankfurt), leaving him fluent in several languages before he settled permanently into German as his medium. He earned a doctorate in chemistry in Vienna before abandoning science entirely for literature.

Auto-da-Fé, his only novel, appeared in 1935 when he was still in his twenties; he fled Vienna for London in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria and spent the following decades not on fiction but on Crowds and Power (1960), an idiosyncratic, decades-in-the-making study of mass psychology and tyranny.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, and died in Zurich in 1994.