Kathrin Röggla - about the author

Kathrin Röggla
An Austrian prose writer, playwright, author of radio plays, and an essayist. Born in 1971 in Salzburg, where she started studying German studies and journalism. She finished her university education in Berlin, where she has been living and writing since 1992. Her literary debut was the novel Nobody Laughs Backwards (Niemand lacht rückwärts) from 1995. In 2001 she directly witnessed 9/11 terror attacks in New York. In reaction to the way they were medialized, she wrote a short prose really ground zero. 11 september and the following (really ground zero. 11. september und folgendes). An adaptation of this novel for the theatre was her first dramatic text. In 2004 – 2008 she travelled repeatedly abroad. She visited for example Georgia, Iran, Japan, or Yemen. In 2004 in the text we are not sleeping (wir schlafen nicht)she focused on the society of performance from the perspective of people in its centre. In 2005 in dark number rages outside (draussen tobt die dunkelziffer) she deals with the outsiders’ perspective, small bankrupts destroyed by large companies. In participants (die beteiligten) from 2009 she confronts the media reception of the Natascha Kampusch case. In her work she focuses on global problems connected with the expansion of capitalist society. Her main tool to tackle these issues is language, into which the problems are inevitably inscribed. Her experiments with language, firmly grounded in the Austrian drama tradition, again and again get the admiration of German-speaking critics. With her unique sense for rhythm, Kathrin Röggla stylizes the language and pushes it to its edge. Very often she omits capital letters and lets the characters speak in the third person… For her, language is the source of comedy and a critical tool at the same time. Despite her common use of documentary techniques (extensive summaries, work with interviews as a source text material etc.), her texts are not documentary at the expense of literary value. They are always artistically convincing interventions into social reality of the contemporary world. Since 2012 Kathrin Röggla is the member of Academy of Arts in Berlin. She is the recipient of many literary and theatre awards, e.g. Italo-Svevo-Preis (2001), Nestroy-Teaterpreis (2010), or Arthur-Schnitzler-Preis (2012).

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