A controversial lyrical force

One of Austria's most controversial writers, Elfriede Jelinek, became the first Austrian to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

One of Austria's most controversial writers and poets, Elfriede Jelinek, on Thursday became the 10th woman and the first Austrian to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

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Born on 20 October 1946 in the town of Muerzzuschlag in the Austrian province of Styria, Jelinek early on started playing the piano, organ and recorder. She decided to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory, passing her organist diploma in 1971.

Music was not her only interest however. She took courses in theater and art history at the University of Vienna on the side, and she never stopped pursuing one of her greatest passions: writing.

Jelinek made her literary debut with her poem collection Lisas Schatten, or Lisa's Shadow, in 1967, before allowing contact with the decade's radical student movement to tilt her writing toward social criticism.

Her 1970 satirical novel

Wir sind lockvoegel baby!,

or

We are bait baby!,

revealed linguistic rebellion against popular culture's deceptive description of the good life. Like with many of her later works, Jelinek shocked readers with her unemotional descriptions of brutality and power play in human relations.

Die Klavierspielerin, or The Piano Teacher, which was published in 1983, is perhaps Jelinek's best-known novel, especially after it was made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke in 2001.

This theme appears again in Jelinek's later books, including Lust in 1989, in which she puts forth a fundamental criticism of civilization through descriptions of sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture.

Jelinek's writing style is difficult to define as she masterfully shifts between prose and poetry to approach philosophical themes and social criticism.