Elias Canetti was the eldest son in a Sephardic Jewish merchant family in Rustchuk, the area now known as Rousse, Bulgaria. The family moved to England in 1911. In 1912 his father died suddenly, and his mother moved the family moved to Vienna. His mother wanted Elias to speak German, so she taught it to him. At this time Canetti already spoke the Spanish dialect of Ladino, Bulgarian, English and some French, but German became his primary language, and the language in which he wrote. From Vienna the family moved first to Zurich and then to Germany, where Canetti graduated from high school.

Canetti returned to Vienna in 1924 to study chemistry. While there, his primary interests changed to philosophy and literature. He began writing after he was introduced into the literary circles of first-republic-Vienna. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929, but never worked as a chemist. In the early 1930s he translated works by the American writer Upton Sinclair. While in Austria angry protesters burned down the Palace of Justice and the author was caught up in the crowd, later describing how he felt himself becoming part of the mob. This event inspired the work for which he is best known, Crowds and Power. It is a study of crowd behavior within human activities ranging from violent mobs to religious congregations.

In 1934 Canetti married Veza Taubner-Calderón, a writer and translator. In 1938, Canetti moved to Paris to escape the persecution of Jews. The next year he immigrated to England, where he mostly lived for the rest of his life. He became involved with the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, who remained a close companion for many years. Canetti's wife died in 1963. His second marriage was with Hera Buschor, an old friend from the 1950s. Together they had one daughter. Despite being a German writer, Canetti settled and stayed in England until the 1970s, receiving British citizenship in 1952. From the 1970s Canetti also maintained a home in Zürich, where he spent his last years with his daughter after his second wife died of cancer in 1988.

Canetti continued to write novels, plays, studies, essays and memoirs throughout his lifetime. In 1981, Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Canetti started publishing in the 1930s, but it was not until the 1960s and especially after the Nobel Prize that his work started to gain critical attention. Among Canetti's awards were the Foreign Book Prize, the Vienna Prize, the Critics Prize, the Great Austrian State Prize, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Prize, the Bühner Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Order of Merit, the Europa Prato Prize, the Hebbel Prize, the Kafka Prize, and the Great Service Cross. He was also awarded honorary degrees from two universities. Canetti died on August 13, 1994 in Zürich.