Franziska Füchsl
Austria
Franziska Füchsl, born in 1991, is one of the most distinctive voices in Austrian literature. She studied German and English philology in Vienna and Language and Form in Kiel, and now divides her time between these two cities. Her writing straddles the boundary between poetry and prose, employing dialect, linguistic shifts and deliberately unsettling imagery. Thematically, they revolve around landscape, origins, social friction and the fragile relationship between humanity and nature. She has received numerous awards for her writing, most recently the German Prize for Nature Writing for
The borderland into which Füchsl leads us is the Upper Austrian Mühlviertel, wedged between the Danube, Bavaria and the Czech Republic, where she grew up. Plot in the classical sense takes a back seat in favour of a poetic space for reflection: the river Grosse Mühl becomes a central figure for movement, detours and transformation. Füchsl combines observations of nature with linguistic reflection and regional history, shifting perspectives between people, plants and objects. Stylistically, the result is a dense, rhythmic text that draws on sound, repetition and displacement. This book is less a narrative than a linguistically powerful river itself.
31st Leukerbad International Literary Festival:
