Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag, Styria, and grew up in Vienna, the daughter of a Catholic mother from a once-prosperous Viennese family and a Czech-Jewish father, a chemist, many of whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Her mother planned a musical career for her, and from childhood she was trained on several instruments, later taking an organist’s diploma at the Vienna Conservatory. She studied theatre and art history at the University of Vienna but broke off her studies because of an anxiety disorder, and during a year of near-total seclusion at home began writing in earnest. Her first book of poems appeared in 1967.

Her novels, among them Women as Lovers, Wonderful, Wonderful Times and The Piano Teacher (1983), dissect sexuality, class and power in a prose built from the clichés of advertising, pornography and everyday speech, turned against themselves. The Piano Teacher, about a Viennese music teacher bound to her mother, became her best-known book and was filmed by Michael Haneke. In Lust and Greed the method grew more extreme. Her plays largely abandon character and plot for streams of voices, confronting Austria’s Nazi past, nationalism and the media.

Jelinek was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991 and a fierce opponent of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party. Citing social phobia, she did not travel to Stockholm for the prize and delivered her Nobel lecture by video. She continues to write for the stage and to publish her work online.