After honouring her partner Ernst Jandl last year, this year Austrian Post is celebrating the Viennese poet and author Friederike Mayröcker in its “Literature from Austria” series.
Born in Vienna in 1924, Mayröcker already began writing poetry during her adolescence. She worked as an English teacher from 1946 until 1969. During the 1950s, she came into contact with avant-garde artists such as Andreas Okopenko and with writers from the “Vienna Group”, and in 1954, she met Ernst Jandl, with whom she enjoyed a close friendship and literary partnership until his passing in 2000. Mayröcker passed away in Vienna in 2021 and was buried in Ernst Jandl’s grave.
Friederike Mayröcker is considered an outstanding linguistic virtuoso. She wrote tirelessly, creating an output of over 120 works, primarily poetry, prose, radio plays, plays and children’s books. Her works full of “lyrical intensity” stand completely on their own; experimental and influenced by surrealism, they were written in her “cave of papers”, bursting with notes, drawings and books. Mayröcker received numerous awards, including the radio play prize of the war blind in 1969 for the radio play “Fünf Mann Menschen” (Five Man Humanity) that she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, and in 2016 becoming the first recipient of the Austrian Book Prize with her volume “fleurs”. Her comprehensive estate is held by the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library. The quote “No life, no love without literature” reflects the closely interwoven relationship between her writing and her life.
