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Her mother Olga, née Buchner, came from the Viennese upper middle class. Her father Friedrich Jelinek was a chemist and of Jewish-Czech descent. Jelinek spent her childhood and youth in Vienna. There she initially attended a monastery school. She then began studying theater studies and art history at the University of Vienna until she was forced to stop studying in 1967 due to anxiety and lived at home in complete isolation for a year. Meanwhile, she began her life as a professional writer. The first novel "bukolit" (1968) remained unpublished until 1979. In the 1960s, Jelinek experimented with texts, approaching the "Vienna Group" in her stylistic expression. In 1970 she wrote the first German-language pop novel with the title "we are decoys baby!", which she assembled from ordinary set pieces.

After that, her works, which included novels as well as radio plays and theater works, became more socially critical. She also completed organ and piano training at the conservatory, which she completed with the organist examination in 1971. In 1972 she married Gottfried Hüngsberg. Her literary breakthrough came in 1975 with the novel "The Lovers", the Marxist-feminist caricature of a local novel. Her main topics now included women in a male-dominated society and the sexual oppression of women. In presenting her themes, Jelinek uses a special language technique: she uses different types of text, such as from advertising or Schubert songs, or she uses stereotypical formulations in an ironic way to reveal their true meanings.

The novel "The Piano Player" was published in 1983. The biographical interpretation predominated in the reviews; the discussion of the text faded into the background. In general, the author uses language in the literal sense in many of her pieces in order to question social ways of thinking. This is represented by novel titles such as "The Lovers" (1975), "The Piano Player" (1983), "Lust" (1989) as well as the plays "What happened after Nora left her husband" (among others 1979), "Clara S. " (including 1982) or "Illness or Modern Women" (premiered in 1987). 

Jelinek packaged the diversity of her literary themes in the major novel "The Children of the Dead" (1995), in which she addresses motifs such as home, mother-daughter relationships, life and death. The play "Sportstück", which premiered in 1998, is also about death. As a Marxist-oriented author, according to her critics, she tried, in the tradition of Berthold Brecht, to further develop the enlightenment function of art using modern literary means. Jelinek became an award-winning writer. Her prizes and awards include, among others, the Austrian State Scholarship for Literature (1972), the Script Prize of the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany (1979), the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne (1986), the Literature Prize of the State of Styria (1987) and Germany highest literary award: the Georg Büchner Prize (1998). The novel "Greed. An Entertainment Novel" was published in 2000.

In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and dramas that, with unique linguistic passion, reveal the absurdity and compelling power of social clichés." On November 28, 2008, her play "Rechnitz" (The Strangling Angel) premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele under the direction of Jossi Wieler. In 2012, the premiere of the work "The Street. The City. The Übefall", directed by Johan Simons, followed at this location. In 2018, her play "Am Königsweg" was named "Play of the Year" by the magazine "Theater aktuell".

Elfriede Jelinek lives in Vienna, Munich and Paris.

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Elfriede Jelinek

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