[3] Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family, he later lived in England, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

By this time, Canetti already spoke Ladino (his native language), Bulgarian, English, and some French; the last two he studied in the year he spent in Britain.

[11] He published two works in Vienna, Komödie der Eitelkeit 1934 (The Comedy of Vanity) and Die Blendung 1935 (Auto-da-Fé, 1935), before escaping to Great Britain.

He reflected on the experiences of Nazi Germany and political chaos in his works, especially exploring mob action and group thinking in the novel Die Blendung and in the non-fiction Crowds and Power (1960).

[12][13] Canetti, who demanded submission from women, later mercilessly skewered Murdoch in his posthumous memoir Party im Blitz (2003).

A writer in German, Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

He is known chiefly for his celebrated trilogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood and of pre-Anschluss Vienna: Die Gerettete Zunge (The Tongue Set Free); Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in My Ear), and Das Augenspiel (The Play of the Eyes); for his modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung); and for Crowds and Power, a psychological study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations.