Bibliofemme News
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07/10/2004
Austria's Elfriede Jelinek takes Nobel Prize
The 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek.
Jelinek was born in 1946 to a father of Czech-Jewish origins and a Viennese mother.
She made her literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967 and is best known for her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher.
Swedish Academy praised "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".
"Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Odon von HorvDath, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group".
The decision to award the prize to a woman was the first since 1996, when Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won. Since the Nobel Prize for Literature was first handed out in 1901, only nine women have won it.
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