Artists
About Artist
Elfriede Jelinek
Poet, Novelist, Playwright
Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag/Styria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna. When she was only four she started learning ballet and French, and in the years that followed received a comprehensive musical training. In 1960 she began to study piano and composition at the Vienna Conservatoire. After completing High School in 1964 she moved on to Vienna University and took courses in Theatre and Art History. In 1967 she broke off her studies and began to write. Poems and prose appeared in anthologies and literary magazines before her first book, "wir sind lockvögel baby" (we're bait baby), was published in 1970.
Today Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most important contemporary authors writing in German. Her first play "Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaften" (What Happened after Nora left Her Husband or Pillars of Societies) was premiered in 1979 and has been followed by other texts for the theatre.
Her 1983 novel "The Piano Teacher" was filmed in 2011 by Michael Haneke and won three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. At Festival/Tokyo 2009 Spring, her text "Clouds. Home." ("Wolken. Heim.") was staged by Akira Takayama in a translation by Tatsuki Hayashi. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of societyʼs cliches and their subjugating power". She has also won the influential Mülheim Dramatists Prize four times.
Festival/Tokyo 2012 featured stagings of her plays "Kein Licht." and "Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)", as well as "Epilog?", her follow-up to "Kein Licht.", in an original tour-style adaptation in central Tokyo by director Akira Takayama. All productions utilized an award-winning set of Japanese translations by Tatsuki Hayashi.