Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and polemicist, counted among the most important German-language authors of the postwar era. He was born in the Netherlands to an unmarried Austrian mother and grew up largely with his maternal grandparents, above all his grandfather, the novelist Johannes Freumbichler. Lung disease, contracted in youth, marked the rest of his life, and he began writing poetry and stories while in a sanatorium. After the breakthrough novel Frost in 1963 he became a leading novelist and playwright, with Correction, Extinction and the memoirs Gathering Evidence among his major works. His fiction treats death, isolation, obsession and illness in long monologues, and his attacks on Austrian provincialism and its silence about the Nazi past made him controversial at home. He died in Gmunden in 1989.