
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 debut novel festival in Kiel. She used unsentimental yet touching language, which revolves precisely and incessantly around things and people, around the countless small, unnoticed events of everyday life with protagonists living in a small town and brief encounters that develop their minds and their lives.
Her second novel Der Winter tut den Fischen gut (tr: Winter Does Good for the Fishes) 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 draws an illustrious society with masterfully placed strokes, in which the certainties of everyday life gradually threaten to slip away and which begins to settle into the small absurd moments full of humour and poetry. The neighbor who wears the work coat, the flatlander who asks for room number six every 21st 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 with their bright multifunctional jackets. They stand there in winter, when the bears are resting, in spring, when the winter is over, in summer with little clothing and in fall, when the sun is low, like figures in a hidden object picture: isolated, seemingly unconnected, like suns of their own world – and yet united in the big picture.