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.