George Benjamin, born in London, started piano lessons at the age of seven and composing when he was nine. From 1974 he studied composition and piano with Peter Gellhorn and in 1976 he went to Paris to study composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Yvonne Loriod at the Paris Conservatoire. Later, at King's College Cambridge, he studied under Alexander Goehr.

Benjamin first came to public prominence attention when, in 1980, he became the youngest composer ever to have a piece performed at the BBC Promenade Concerts.

Among his many honors are the Koussevitzky International Critics Award and a Grand Prix du Disque (both 1987), the Contemporary Record of the Year Award from Gramophone (1990) and the Edison Award (1998). His other honors include the First Prize of the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund in Boston (1985), the first Schoenberg-Preis in Berlin (2002) and the Royal Philharmonic Society Award (2003, for Palimpsest I-II).

Benjamin's reputation has flourished in France and the country has almost become a second home to him. He was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 1996; he also has been a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste since 2000.

Benjamin's music has been widely performed in America; in recent years the orchestras in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Chicago and Boston have programmed his music. He frequently conducts there and has built up a particularly close relationship with the Tanglewood Festival. After directing a month-long new music venture with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1992, London's South Bank Centre invited him to curate the first 'Meltdown' festival in July 1993.

Most recently, the London Symphony Orchestra featured many of his important orchestral works (2002-03) and ten works were performed in Tokyo (2003). George Benjamin lives in London.