Nobel Prize Recipient. He received world-wide recognition upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He earned the coveted award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power." Though born in Bulgaria in a family of Spanish Sephardic Jews, his family relocated to England for his education when he was six years old. After his father's death a year later, his widowed mother with her three sons relocated to Switzerland. From 1916 he studied in Zurich, producing his first literary work, a verse play, "Junius Brutus." Though he received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929, he never sought to be a chemist, choosing to devote himself to writing instead. Although he spoke several languages, including Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Ladino, and English, he wrote in German. He worked as a translator and was the German translator of the writings of American author and 1934 Nobel Prize recipient Upton Sinclair. In 1934 he married author Venetiana "Veza" Taubner-Calderon. After his 1935 novel about the human madness, "Die Blendungen" or "The Deception" was published, he received public recognition. When Austria was invaded by Adolph Hitler's Nazi forces on March 12, 1938, he escaped from Jewish persecution in his homeland to Paris for a year before reaching England. Staying in exile for many years, he received his British citizenship in 1952. He returned to Austria in the 1970s. After his first wife's death in 1963, he married Hera Buschorin in 1971 and the couple had a daughter. His literary body of work includes a novel, three plays, a study of mass movements, some author profiles and "Memoirs of Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, the Torch in My Ear, the Play of the Eyes." He wrote essays, about authors such as Kafka or Heinrich Böll. His major work is "Crowds and Power" in 1960.