Elias Canetti was born in 1905 in Ruse, Bulgaria, and grew up in Manchester, Zurich, Frankfurt, and Vienna. In 1929, he received his doctorate in natural sciences in Vienna. The manuscript of his novel "Auto-da-Fé" was completed in 1930/31 and published in 1935. In 1938, Canetti emigrated to London, where he began anthropological and social historical studies for "Crowds and Power" (1960). From the 1970s onwards, he lived mainly in Switzerland and gained further fame with his plays, writings, and autobiographical books, including "The Tongue Set Free." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. He passed away in Zurich in 1994.