Biography
Ilse Aichinger was born in Vienna in 1921 together with her twin sister Helga, the daughters of a teacher and a Jewish physician. After Austria's annexation in 1938 the family faced Nazi persecution: Helga escaped to Britain on a Kindertransport in 1939, while Ilse, classed as a “half-Jew”, was barred from university, was conscripted for labour and shielded her mother from deportation; her grandmother was deported and murdered in 1942. After the war she began studying medicine but broke off her studies to write her only novel, “Die größere Hoffnung” (The Greater Hope, 1948). In 1952 she won the Gruppe 47 prize for “Spiegelgeschichte” (Mirror Story), and the following year she married the poet Günter Eich. Her work includes stories such as “Der Gefesselte” (The Bound Man), radio plays such as “Knöpfe” (Buttons), poems (“Verschenkter Rat”, 1978) and increasingly terse, language-critical prose such as “Schlechte Wörter” (Bad Words, 1976); her honours include the Nelly Sachs Prize (1971), the Franz Kafka Prize (1983) and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature (1995). Aichinger died in Vienna in 2016.
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