G. Kanovičius was born into a traditional Lithuanian Jewish family in Jonava in June 1929.
18. He fled war-torn Lithuania with his parents and lived in
Kazakhstan and the Urals. In 1945 the family returned to Vilnius. In 1953 G. Kanovičius graduated in Slavic
studies at Vilnius State University. Kanovič's works have been translated into Lithuanian, Polish, German, English, French, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew and other languages. He writes in Russian.
Since 2016, the Jonava Public Library and the Municipality of Jonava have been awarding the Grigory Kanovich Literary Prize for the best prose book of the year.