Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer is an Austrian novelist and poet, one of the leading women prose writers in German. Her mainly fictional works present the horrors of Fascism, especially the repression of minorities.
Early life and education
Kerschbaumer was born in Garches near Paris where her Cuban father and Austrian mother were living to escape the Spanish Civil War. After spending her childhood years mainly in Costa Rica and the Austrian Tyrol, she worked in England for a year when she was 17 and then went on to Italy. In 1957, she returned to Austria to further her education. From 1963, she studied Romance languages at Vienna University and spent two years in Romania before earning a doctorate in Romanian linguistics in 1973. In 1971, she married the painter Helmut Kurz-Goldenstein.
Career
After completing her studies, Kerschbaumer worked as a translator, mainly from Spanish. Her first novel, Der Schwimmer was published in 1976, describing how inmates tried to escape from an institution in Franco's Spain. In 1980, she gained fame by publishing Der weibliche Name des Widerstandsconsisting of seven fictional accounts of women in Nazi concentration camps. An unusual combination of documentary literature and creative writing, the work achieved further success when it appeared as a television film the following year and was published as a popular paperback edition in 1982. Her third work, Schwestern is a novel tracing the experiences of several generations of an Austrian family as the events of the 20th century affect their lives. Kerschbaumer has also written plays which have been well received on Austrian radio but have not been published. From 1992 to 2000, she wrote the three novels of the Die Fremde series, an autobiographical trilogy tracing the life of a girl born in the Austrian alps, who goes to France and England before studyingItalian language and art in Tuscany. Her most recent work, Wasser und Wind is a collection of poems written from 1988 and 2005.
