ELFRIEDE JELINEK was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna, where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she is the author of Greed and received the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature in 1986. The film by Michael Haneke of her novel The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In awarding Jelinek the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the “extraordinary linguistic zeal” of her writing reveals “the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” Jelinek lives in Vienna.
