Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded many honors, including the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Elfriede Jelinek is magnificent.

— Mary Gaitskill

Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride.

— The Guardian

Her musical flow of voices and counter-voices that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.

— Nobel Prize Committee
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