The Modern Novel

Biography

Elfriede Jelinek was born in 1946 in Mürzzuschalg in Styria. She studied music at the Vienna Conservatory and then studied drama and art history at the University of Vienna. There was considerable tension between her parents, and her father was interned in a mental institution. Jelinek herself then suffered a mental breakdown when she was seventeen. She has maintained that her writing, which she started shortly afterwards, helped her to recover. She first wrote poetry, for which she received prizes. In 1969 her father died in the mental institution and Jelinek became involved in the student movement and, in particular the Grazer Gruppe and its magazine manuskripte.

She now started writing radio plays and then a series of novels. In 1974 she married Gottfried Hüngsberg, who had been associated with the film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and also joined the Communist Party (which she left in 1991). Her early novels were experimental but she changed after she became active in the Austrian student movement. Michael – Ein Jugendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft, the first novel written after her conversion, is a critique of the consumer society. In her later novels – and those for which she is best known – she takes a feminist perspective, looking at the role of women in the workplace and, more particular, the role of women in sexual relationships with men. Her concern, she has said on many occasions, is to examine the political and economic system that governs people’s lives, both in Austria and the world at large. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 but declined to go to Stockholm to accept it.

Books about Elfriede Jelinek

Bartsch, Kurt and Günther A. Höfler: Elfriede Jelinek (in German)

Other links

Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize award)
Austrian writer wins Nobel prize
Elfriede Jelinek’s homepage (in German)
Elfriede Jelinek (in German)
Elfriede Jelinek (in German)
Elfriede Jelinek (in German)
Elfriede Jelinek (in German)
Jelinek, Elfriede (in German)
Porträt Elfriede Jelinek (in German)
Beschimpft und gefeiert (reaction to her winning the Nobel Prize – in German)
Jelinetz (der Plattform zu Elfriede Jelinek und Ihren Werken – in German)
Elfriede Jelinek im Zenit des Ruhms? (in German) (interview)
Interview (in German)
Interview (in German)
Interview (in German)