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Elias Canetti (1905-1994) was a Bulgarian-born English novelist, essayist, sociologist, and playwright, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

His 1935 German novel Die Blendung ("The Deception"), was published in America as The Tower of Babel and in England as Auto-da-Fé. Originally planned as the first in a series of eight novels examining mad visionaries, the book deals with the dangers inherent in believing that rigid, dissociated intellectualism and detached, dogmatic scholarship can prevail over evil, chaos, and destruction. Set in Vienna and Paris, the novel tells the story of Peter Kien, an internationally respected scholar of Chinese studies who maintains a personal library of 25,000 volumes. After dreaming that the books are burned, Kien marries his housekeeper Therese, believing that she will preserve his beloved library should disaster befall him. Therese throws him out of his book-filled apartment, however, and Kien, now homeless, enters the grotesque underworld of the city. Delusional, he fluctuates between horrifying hallucinations and an unspeakable reality. Kien's disintegration finally leads him to set fire to his precious books and to await his own death in the ensuing inferno.

Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria into Sephardic Jewish family. The family were well-to-do merchants, who spoke old Spanish. When Canetti was six years old, his family moved to Manchester, England. After the sudden death of his father his mother took the family to Vienna, where he learned German.

From 1916 to 1921 Canetti studied in Zürich, and produced his first literary work, Junius Brutus, a verse play. During a visit to Berlin in 1928 he met Bertold Brecht, Isaak Babel, and George Grosz, and started to plan a series of novels on the subject of human madness. The idea resulted in the novel Die Blendung, which was well received after WWII among others by Thomas Mann and Iris Murdoch, and considered to heve been ahead of its time.

Canetti graduated in 1929 as Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Vienna. He married Veza Taubner-Calderòn in 1934 (died 1963). In the 1930s he wrote two plays, Die Hochzeit and Die Komödie Der Eitelkeit, forerunners of the theater of absurd. To escape the systematic persecution of Jews Canetti fled to Paris in 1938 and next year he immigrated to England, where he mostly lived for the rest of his life, maintaining also a home in Zürich from the 1970s. In 1971 he married Hera Buschor, who died in 1988.

As an essayist Canetti gained fame with his The Conscience of Words (1976). With one exeption these essays date from the 1960s and 1970s and deal mostly with literary topics. Canetti sees that writers are responsible of the preservation, revivification, and invention of the lifesustaining myths and their meaning. Tolstoy is rejected as a model for having 'struck a kind of pact with death' in his late turn to religion, and Kafka emerges 'among all writers as the greatest expert on power'.

Among Canetti's several awards were Foreign Book Prize (1949, France), Vienna Prize (1966), Critics Prize (1967, Germany), Great Austrian State Prize (1967), Bavarien Academy of Fine Arts Prize (1969), Bühner Prize (1972), Nelly Sachs Prize (1975), Order of Merit (1979, Germany), Europa Prato Prize (1980, Italy), Hebbel Prize (1980), Kafka Prize (1981), Great Service Cross (1983, Germany). He had also honorary degrees from Manchester and Munich universities. Canetti died on August 13, 1994 in Zürich. His autobiographical works include Die Gerettete Zunge (1980), Die Fackel Im Ohr (1982) and Das Augenspiel (1985).

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