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Gabriel David JosipoviciFBA FRSL (/ˌdʒɒsɪpoʊˈviːtʃi/JOSS-i-po-VEE-chee; born 8 October 1940) is a British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, and playwright. He is an Emeritus professor, after having been Professor at theUniversity of Sussex.[1]
He was born inNice, France in 1940, of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine Jewish parents. He lived out the war years in a village in theMassif Central and when the war ended in 1945 his mother returned with him to Egypt, where she was born. There he was educated at Victoria College,Cairo, until in 1956 he and his mother emigrated to England, where he finished his schooling atCheltenham College, Gloucestershire. He read English atSt Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating in 1961 with a First Class degree, and in 1963 he joined the School of European Studies at the newly-formedUniversity of Sussex. He retired from Sussex in 1998 to devote himself to writing. He gave the Northcliffe Lectures at the University of London in 1981-2 and was Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford in 1996-7. He has published nineteen novels, three volumes of stories and a number of critical books, as well asA Life, a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch.Carcanet Press has published his work since his novelContre Jour in 1986. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in France and Germany, and his work has been translated into many languages, including French (where his novelInfinity, translated by Bernard Hoepffner, won thePrix Laure Bataillon in 2016) and Arabic. In 2007 Gabriel Josipovici gave theUniversity of London Coffin Lecture on Literature; the lecture was entitled "What ever happened to Modernism?" and was subsequently published as a book by Yale University Press.[2]
He has published reviews in many journals, includingEncounter (magazine),The London Magazine andThe New York Review of Books, and writes regularly forThe Times Literary Supplement.
Josipovici was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature in 1997[3] andFellow of the British Academy in 2001.[4]
