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Gabriel Josipovici

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  • 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 novels are Goldberg: Variations (Carcanet, 2001) and Only Joking (Zweitausendeins, Germany, 2005). In 2006 Carcanet published a collection of his essays, The Singer on the Shore and his novel Everything Passes.


    'In prose that is lively and learned, perceptive and persuasive, Josipovici's timely meditations proffer both consolation and challenges to the knotty problem of forgetting and remembering...[a] slim yet insightful volume.'

    Ian Ellison, Journal of European Studies



    'Exciting, stimulating literary criticism...Josipovici has always been one of our most ambitious and wide-ranging critics. 100 Days is an extraordinary collection of reflections and criticism, a joy to read and, in its personal revelations, deeply moving.' 

    David Herman, Jewish Chronicle 

    'Deceptively slight, disarmingly circumstantial, they are a joy to read...not an essay goes by without some passing insight into the elusive nature of artistic experience...charming.'

    Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement

    'Josipovici is at his best in his dissections of art's representations, its bridges between personal and cultural worlds.'


    Bernadette Ashby, DURA Dundee

    'Remarkable originality as a writer, a starry and loyal name on the list of his publishers, Carcanet, and one of the outstanding writers and critics of our time'
    David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
    'Gabriel Josipovici provides an elegant lesson, to cite the title of his final chapter, in letting go'
    Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement
    'As always, Josipovici asks big questions. Why, as a culture, are we fascinated by issues of forgetting? Is there something a little anxious about the injunction to "never forget"?'
    David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
    'Gabriel Josipovici is one of the outstanding writers and critics of the post-war period.'
    David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
    'Josipovici's best fiction has always been able to turn silence and reticence into powerful emotions, producing stories of pain and sadness. Contre-Jour is Josipovici at his very best.'
    David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
      'The Cemetery in Barnes, though outwardly modest, expands in the mind and then lingers there - a tribute to its author's rejection of the need to explain, his willingness to hint at all the ways in which life is a "labyrinth" without trying to say the last word about any of them.'
    Leo Robson, The New Statesman
    'The Cemetery in Barnes is a subtle, disturbing meditation on death and desire, on murder, suicide and arson glimpsed, as it were, out of the corner of the eye; an examination of a life lived in three locations and told - the cue being taken from Monteverdi's Orfeo - in three interweaving voices, whose total effect has the disturbing power of a bad dream.'
    Nick Lezard, Goldsmiths Prize Judge
      'I do not think there is any writer working in English at present who is more subtly inventive and more original.'
    Tales from the Reading Room
    'One of the very best writers now at work in the English language.'
    Guardian
     'I am a constant admirer of his talent and intellect.' Dame Muriel Spark
    Awards won by Gabriel Josipovici Long-listed, 2019 The Republic of Consciousness Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes) Short-listed, 2018 The Goldsmiths Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes)
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