Elfriede Jelinek · Arts & Literature
Austrian novelist and playwright (The Piano Teacher, The Children of the Dead); Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices; daughter of a chemist of Czech-Jewish origin
20 October 1946, Mürzzuschlag, Styria, Austria
Vienna · Munich
Elfriede Jelinek is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Austrian novelist and playwright (The Piano Teacher, The Children of the Dead); Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices; daughter of a chemist of Czech-Jewish origin
Origins and early life
Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in Mürzzuschlag, in Styria, and grew up in Vienna, the only child of Friedrich Jelinek and Olga Ilona Buchner.
Work and career
Her father, a chemist of Czech-Jewish origin, escaped persecution in the Second World War by working in strategically important industry, while many of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Her mother was a Roman Catholic of Romanian and German descent, and Elfriede was sent to a Catholic kindergarten and then to a convent school in Vienna. Trained from early childhood in piano, organ and recorder, she studied composition at the Vienna Conservatory and theatre and art history at the University of Vienna, and took her organist's diploma in 1971.
She made her debut with the poems of Lisas Schatten in 1967, and her novels Die Liebhaberinnen, in 1975, Die Ausgesperrten, in 1980, and The Piano Teacher, in 1983, drawn from her own life and filmed by Michael Haneke in 2001, won her the German-reading public. After her marriage to Gottfried Hüngsberg in 1974 she divided her time between Vienna and Munich, and in 1995 The Children of the Dead raised the murdered Jews of Europe out of the Styrian soil.
Recognition
Her theatre left dialogue behind for polyphonic monologues, voices from different layers of the psyche and history heard at once, and won her the Georg Büchner Prize in 1998. The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2004, hers alone, honoured her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power. Kept from travelling by social phobia, she recorded her Nobel lecture, Sidelined, shown on video at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on 7 December 2004.
She has translated Thomas Pynchon, Feydeau and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and in 2021 she was made an honorary citizen of Vienna.
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Source: Wikipedia — Elfriede Jelinek / NobelPrize.org Literature 2004
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Austrian novelist and playwright (The Piano Teacher, The Children of the Dead); Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices; daughter of a chemist of Czech-Jewish origin
Source: Wikipedia — Elfriede Jelinek / NobelPrize.org Literature 2004
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