Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel laureate who sends texts instead of herself as Vienna marks her 80th

Elfriede Jelinek

Photo: The original uploader was Ghuengsberg at English Wikipedia. / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 20, 1946 Mürzzuschlag, Styria, Austria
Occupation	Playwright and novelist
Awards	Nobel Prize in Literature · Georg Büchner Prize · Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis · Else Lasker-Schüler Dramatist Prize · Franz Kafka Prize · Stig Dagerman Prize · Bremen Literature Prize

Elfriede Jelinek does not go to her own celebrations. She never flew to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this autumn, as Vienna marks her eightieth birthday with readings, panels and a stage marathon, she is once again sending words in her place: texts mailed to organisers, videos recorded at home. The absence has become part of the work. For half a century she has written from the sidelines about a country that would often have preferred her silence, and that country keeps putting her on its biggest stages.

Her newest play hands the argument to animals. In Unter Tieren, a pigeon, a hare, a rat and a mallard pick over the routes money travels through a world where everything has been turned into capital, and the premiere at the Salzburg Festival ended with the audience on its feet. Nicolas Stemann, the director she asked for, staged it as a sprawling, funny and furious happening, made together with the Burgtheater, where the production continues this season. It is the kind of text only Jelinek writes now: no characters in the usual sense, more than a hundred pages of speech for a director to cut into an evening.

The voice was trained before it was literary. Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in Mürzzuschlag, in Styria, and grew up in Vienna with a mother who had mapped out a musical career for her, from the organ to the violin. She earned an organist’s diploma at the Vienna Conservatory. Her father, a chemist of Czech-Jewish background, got through the war doing industrial work while many of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. She enrolled at the University of Vienna to study art history and theatre, then left when an anxiety disorder made the lecture halls impossible. Her first book, the poems of Lisas Schatten, came out in 1967.

The novels that followed took the clichés of Austrian life apart one sentence at a time. Women as Lovers, in 1975, treated romance as an economic transaction for two working women. Wonderful, Wonderful Times, in 1980, followed a pack of teenagers in postwar Vienna toward violence. Then came The Piano Teacher in 1983, the book most readers outside the German-speaking world know: Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory who still lives with her mother, whose desire surfaces only as control and self-harm. The novel came out of a conservatory world its author knew from the inside.

Michael Haneke’s film of The Piano Teacher won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2001, along with the acting prizes for Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel, and it fixed an image of Jelinek as the author of one transgressive book. The image is too small. Lust, published in 1989 and dismissed by some critics as pornography, opened a cycle on the deadly sins that continued with Gier in 2000 and closed with Neid, a “private novel” she posted chapter by chapter on her own website in 2007 and 2008. It reached print only in July 2025, as a Rowohlt paperback of 748 pages.

Her larger achievement may lie in the theatre, where she did away with the character altogether. Ein Sportstück opened at the Burgtheater in January 1998 in Einar Schleef’s staging, with an 80-voice speaking chorus and a premiere that ran until one in the morning; her mother, then 93, sat through all of it. Die Schutzbefohlenen, her text about refugees, has been rewritten again and again as the news changed. She won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1998 and the Mülheim Dramatist Prize in 2002, 2004, 2009 and 2011.

The Swedish Academy gave her the Nobel Prize in 2004 “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays”. She stayed home. Her anxiety disorders, she has said, rule out flying and ceremonies, so her lecture, Im Abseits, or “Sidelined”, was recorded in advance and shown on video at the Academy on 7 December 2004.

Few laureates have split opinion so sharply. In 2005 the academician Knut Ahnlund resigned in protest, calling her work “whining, unenjoyable public pornography”. At home she had spent years being cast as a traitor for insisting on the Nazi past that Austria preferred to leave alone. The older complaint, that her prose is unreadable, misses how the method works. Jelinek writes in the borrowed language of advertising, tabloids, alpine kitsch and philosophy, and lets it run on until it gives itself away. The difficulty is the point.

The books keep finding new forms. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the company of Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, turned The Children of the Dead, her enormous zombie novel set around an alpine guesthouse, into a silent Super 8 film shot with local Styrian performers; it won the FIPRESCI prize at the Berlinale in 2019. Gitta Honegger’s translation, the first in English, arrived from Yale University Press in 2024, almost three decades after the German original. The composer Olga Neuwirth, who set Jelinek’s libretto for Lost Highway in 2003, is among the artists sending greetings to Vienna this month.

The Jelinek-Jahr opened in Vienna on 12 March with a series that takes her work to Paris, Warsaw, New York, São Paulo and Tokyo. On 26 September the Volkstheater opened Jan Philipp Gloger’s Die Ankunft, a montage of more than three hours built from Wolken.Heim, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) and two other plays. The Literaturmuseum of the Austrian National Library devotes an evening to The Piano Teacher on 14 October, followed by a screening of Haneke’s film at the METRO Kinokulturhaus, and on 23 October the Burgtheater hosts “Die Weltautorin”, an evening of readings by Birgit Minichmayr.

Jelinek turns 80 on 20 October. Gottfried Hüngsberg, her husband from 1974, died in 2022. Much of her writing still appears first on her own website, and the speeches she no longer delivers in person arrive as texts or as videos she records herself. The stages keep asking for more.

Tags: novelists, playwrights, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Haneke, Ein Sportstück, The Children of the Dead