Carrère was born into a wealthy family in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. His father, Louis Carrère d'Encausse[a], is a retired insurance executive. His mother, historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (born Hélène Zourabichvili, the daughter of Georgian émigrés), is a member and perpetual secretary of the Académie française and former member of the European Parliament. She is a cousin of Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili. Carrère has two sisters: Nathalie Carrère, a lawyer, and Marina Carrère d'Encausse, a doctor, TV Presenter and novelist. He is the nephew of composer Nicolas Zourabichvili and cousin of philosopher François Zourabichvili.
Carrère studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and Sciences Po (the Paris Institute of Political Studies).
As an alternative to military service, Carrère taught French for two years in Surabaya in Indonesia. He then became a film critic for the magazines Télérama and Positif (magazine). In 1982 his first book, a monograph on the film director Werner Herzog, was published. The following year saw the publication of his first novel L’amie du jaguar, in which he drew on his experiences in Indonesia. His second novel, Bravoure, based on the story of Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori and their stay at Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, was published in 1984. Both Carrère's first and second novels won literary prizes (the 1984 Prix Passion and 1985 Prix littéraire de la Vocation respectively), but it was his third novel, La Moustache, published in 1986, that introduced the author to a wider readership. Carrère later adapted the book for a film, which he also directed and which won the Label Europa Cinemas prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. An essay in which Carrère explores alternative history, Le détroit de Behring: introduction à l'uchronie, was also published in 1986. In 1988 Carrère published Hors d'atteinte, a novel about a woman who leaves her life to chance. His next work, published in 1993, was Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts, a fictionalised biography of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. This was followed by a novel, La Classe de neige, which won the 1995 Prix Femina and was adapted into a film by Claude Miller.

Return to Emmanuel Carrère Autograph Profile