Enlarge image
Friederike Mayröcker
Photo: Herbert Spies / dpa
The Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker is dead. The grand dame of experimental literature died at the age of 96 on Friday in Vienna, as the Suhrkamp Verlag in Berlin announced, citing Mayröcker's immediate circle.
In her work, which comprises around 100 titles, including poems, text collages, novels, children's books and stage texts, Mayröcker rejected common narrative models. Critics saw in the writer a "sophisticated technician of fading and fading out, viewing and layering, quoting and looting". Your youngest volume »since I am in the morning and moss green. Step to the window «was on the shortlist for the prize awarded at the Leipzig Book Fair just a few days ago. Mayröcker showed once more the power of her and her language.
She has summed up the relationship to her work, which has arisen over 70 years of tireless work: »I live, I write.« In 2013, at the age of 89, she published the diary-like volume of poetry »études«, once more enigmatic and enlightening as in one Tinkering connected.
In 2014 followed - in a similar style - the band »cahier«.
Mayröcker discovered his love for writing at the age of 15.
She was the daughter of a teacher and a hat maker - and, to her regret, had to work a job in her parents' home due to lack of money.
She was an English teacher for 23 years.
Only then did she follow her actual calling.
The decisive factor in the 1950s was the connection to the Viennese literary scene around Ingeborg Bachmann and the encounter with the writer and word acrobat Ernst Jandl (1925-2000).
They were a perfect couple until his death.
In 1956 she published prose sketches and miniatures under the title "Larifari".
Her breakthrough came in 1966 with »Death by the Muses«.
In the following years Mayröcker wrote many radio plays - sometimes together with Jandl.
Over the decades a work was created that was summarized in five volumes as »Gesammelte Prosa« in 2001.
"Gesammelte Gedichte" followed in 2003.
The poet was awarded the Georg Trakl Prize (1977), the Hölderlin Prize (1993), the Lasker-Schüler Prize (1996) and the Büchner Prize (2001), among others.
ime / dpa