Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici (born October 8, 1940, Nice, France) is a French-born British novelist, literary theorist, dramatist, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by its experimental form and its attention to language.

From 1945 Josipovici was reared in Egypt. He was educated at Victoria College, Cairo, and attended Cheltenham (England) College and St. Edmund Hall, Oxford (B.A., 1961). In 1963 he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex at Brighton, where he remained until retiring as professor emeritus in 1998.

Josipovici laid the philosophical framework for his fiction in his books of criticism, including The World and the Book (1971), The Lessons of Modernism (1977), Writing and the Body (1982), The Mirror of Criticism (1983), The Book of God (1988), and Text and Voice (1992). His novels grew progressively experimental. The first three—The Inventory (1968), Words (1971), and The Present (1975)—were written mostly in dialogue, whereas Migrations (1977) and The Air We Breathe (1981) were composed of a series of images and sound patterns following a loosely narrative form.

Among Josipovici’s other novels were The Echo Chamber (1980), Conversations in Another Room (1984), Contre-Jour (1986), The Big Glass (1991), In a Hotel Garden (1993), Hotel Andromeda (2014), and The Cemetery in Barnes (2018). The radio play Vergil Dying (1981) was perhaps his most acclaimed drama. He also wrote the short-fiction collections Mobius the Stripper (1974), Four Stories (1977), and In the Fertile Land (1987). Josipovici’s later nonfiction works included A Life (2001), a biography of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010), in which he offered a harsh assessment of contemporary English literature. Forgetting (2020) explores both remembering and forgetting, focusing on such topics as war memorials and dementia.