Austrian Woman Writer Wins Nobel Prize
Austrian woman writer wins Nobel Prize
STOCKHOLM, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) — Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday becoming only the 10th woman — and the first Austrian — to win the prize.
The 57-year-old writer is best-known for her autobiographical 1983 novel “The Piano Teacher” which was made into a movie in 2001.
Announcing the award, the Swedish Academy praised Jelinek for ” her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.”
Born in the Austrian town of Murzzuschlag in 1946 to a father of Czech-Jewish origins and a Viennese mother, Jelinek made her literary debut with a collection of poems “Lisas Schatten” in 1967.
She won wider acclaim among the German-reading audience with her 1975 novel “Women as Lovers” and her “Wonderful, Wonderful Times” in 1980.
“Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism,” the Swedish Academy said in its citation.
“The nature of Jelinek’s texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical scenes and filmic sequences,” the jury said.
This year’s Nobel award announcements began Monday with the prize in medicine going to Americans Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck for their work on the sense of smell.
On Tuesday, Americans David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek took the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.
On Wednesday, Israeli biochemists Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose of the United States shared the chemistry prize for their work related to how the human body singles out unwanted proteins for destruction to defend itself from disease.
The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — the only one not awarded in Sweden — will be announced Friday in Oslo, Norway. The economics prize will be announced Oct. 11.
The prizes, which include a 1.3 million-US-dollar check, a gold medal and a diploma, are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prize’s creator Alfred Nobel.