Anna Weidenholzer ©

Anna Weidenholzer [Austria]

Anna Weidenholzer was born in Linz in 1984 and has lived in Vienna since 2002. She studied comparative literature in Vienna and Wrocław, while working in the regional department of a daily newspaper.

Her first book, Der Platz des Hundes (2010; tr: The Place of the Dog), was nominated for the European Festival of the First Novel in Kiel. Her language is unsentimental, yet moving. It revolves precisely and incessantly around people and things, around the countless small, unnoticed events in the everyday lives of protagonists living in a small town and the brief encounters that shape their minds and lives.

Her second novel, Der Winter tut den Fischen gut (tr: Winter Is Good for the Fish), was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In 2013, she was honoured with the Reinhard Priessnitz Prize. Her novel Weshalb die Herren Seesterne tragen (tr: Why Gentlemen Wear Starfish) was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2016. In 2017, she received the Outstanding Artist Award for Literature of the Republic of Austria.

In her new collection of stories, Hier treibt mein Kartoffelherz (Matthes & Seitz Berlin; tr: Here Drifts My Potato Heart), she paints the picture of an illustrious society with masterful strokes. In it, the certainties of everyday life gradually threaten to slip away and begin to settle into small, absurd moments full of humour and poetry. There’s the neighbour who’s always wearing a work smock, the flatlander who asks for room number six every 21 October, Isabelle who pulls the fur off the rabbits, Cervicek, Marianne, Mr Adam, and all the lonely people who have blended into the landscape at some point or other in their bright, multifunctional jackets. They stand there in winter, when the bears are resting; in spring, when the winter has come to an end; in summer, wearing little clothing; and in autumn, when the sun is low. Like figures in a magic eye picture – isolated, seemingly unconnected, like suns of their own world – they are yet united in the big picture.