Thomas Bernhard

novelist, playwright

Bernhard is the most significant Austrian writer of the generation born in the 1930s and coming into adulthood after World War II. The painful experience growing up as an unwanted and sick child strongly informed his later writing. He saw with merciless clarity through the lies and sentimentalities of his fellow Austrians and she skewered them in plays and novels that are both hilarious and depressing. Like Doderer, Bernhard was a writer of high intensity and great linguistic originality.