His father, Louis Carrère d'Encausse[a], is a retired insurance executive and his mother, historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (born Hélène Zourabichvili, the daughter of Georgian émigrés), was a member and perpetual secretary of the Académie française and former member of the European Parliament.

An essay in which Carrère explores alternative history, Le détroit de Behring: introduction à l'uchronie, was also published in 1986.

His next work, published in 1993, was Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts, a fictionalised biography of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

In the book he revealed that his maternal grandfather had worked as a translator for the occupying German forces in World War II and had disappeared in 1944, presumably killed by members of the French Resistance.

[8] In 2016 Carrère published a collection of his journalism, Il est avantageux d'avoir où aller [fr].

An edition published in English in 2019 with the title 97,196 Words: Essays includes an article on Emmanuel Macron written in 2017 for The Guardian.

[9] In his 2020 book Yoga, Carrère writes about his experience of depression and four months spent in the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, where he was diagnosed as bipolar and treated with ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy and lithium.

His weekly articles were published in L'Obs in France, El País in Spain, la Repubblica in Italy and Le Temps in Switzerland.