His name reflects his mother's enthusiasm for the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, while his surname comes from his grandparents, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina from Kiev and Odessa in the late nineteenth century.

After an adolescence spent in neighbourhood cinemas showing double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favourite authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires University, wrote for local and Spanish cinephile magazines, and published an early essay on James, which he developed from his university thesis – El laberinto de la apariencia (The Labyrinth of Appearance, 1964), a book which he later suppressed.

In his early twenties he became acquainted with Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo in Buenos Aires.

The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger's wartime diaries and French newsreels of the occupation period.

However, his sole novel from the period gained a wide audience - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

In 2008 he started work on the libretto for a chamber opera with the musician Pablo Mainetti – Ultramarina, based on motives from his own novel El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp).

Cozarinsky filmed in such diverse locations as Budapest, Rotterdam, Tallinn, Tangiers, Vienna, Granada, Saint Petersburg, Seville and Patagonia.