The exhibition Elias Canetti, a Jewish Emigré in Britain: People, Places, Impressions 1939-1988 reunites Didsbury with one of its most celebrated sons.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria and spent most of his adult life between Vienna, London and Zurich, but the first school he ever visited was on Barlow Moor Road after his father took a job at his brother-in-law’s business and relocated the family from the shores of the Danube to the banks of the Mersey.

Jacques Canetti’s sudden death from a heart attack as he read the Manchester Guardian in October 1912 prompted his wife to leave first Burton Road and then England altogether with her three young sons after barely two years here. Little did she know then that her oldest son would one day return to England – Hampstead this time – in flight from the Nazis and become a British citizen, only giving up his London flat a few years before his death in Switzerland in 1994.

The first volume of his memoirs, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1981, details his formative stint in Manchester. Didsbury Library, which opened in 1915, and Canetti missed each other by all of two years, making this a near-perfect homecoming for a writer whose only novel centres on an obsessive bibliophile and who kept a personal library in both Zurich and London until he was an old man. This exhibition tells his story in the place where it all started.