Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Jewish parents of Italo-Russian, Romano-Levantine extraction. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to England. He read English at a St.Edmund Hall, Oxford and from 1963 to 1998 was first a lecturer, then a Professor in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of some twenty novels, ten books of criticism, a memoir of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous stage and radio plays. His reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, the New York and the London Review of Books. Carcanet publish his novels and fictions Contre-Jour (1986), In the Fertile Land (1987), Steps (1990), The Big Glass (1991), In a Hotel Garden (1993) and Moo Pak (1995) and his essays Text and Voice (1993). His most recent fictions with Carcanet are The Cemetery in Barnes (2018), longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize, and Hotel Andromeda (2014). Carcanet also published his non-fiction Forgetting (2019) and 100 Days (2021) and the combined fiction and literary critical book Partita and A Winter in Zürau (2024).

'... a fascinating book of reflections on memory and forgetting... This mix of detailed readings has been typical of Josipovici's critical work... It is what has made him one of the outstanding critics of our time.' David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle