His mother was of working-class Irish descent and lived most of her life in the Lavender Hill area of London; his father was a Basque from Bilbao and was often absent.
The teachers he had here, often men who had returned from fighting in the war determined to make a better world, were a great influence on de Larrabeiti, something he would later fictionalise in Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite.
After leaving school at sixteen, de Larrabeiti initially worked as a librarian at a public library on Magdalen Road in Earlsfield, south London.
He then taught English in Casablanca, and in 1961 was the photographer on the University of Oxford's Marco Polo Expedition, travelling four months overland on a pair of BSA motorcycles and sidecar with Stanley Johnson and Tim Severin to Afghanistan and India.
2006 saw the publication of his most recent novel, Princess Diana's Revenge; a collection of memoirs entitled Spots of Time was published in early 2007.