Eva Menasse

Eva Menasse was born on May 11, 1970 and grew up in Vienna, Austria by a Jewish father and a catholic mother, who was originally from Sudetenland. Her father Hans Menasse was a well-known former football player in Austria’s national team. She is half-sister of Robert Menasse, who is also an established writer and intellectual in Austria.

Menasse completed her studies in History and German literature in Austria and started her career as a journalist. She worked as an editor at the news magazine Profil, in Vienna. After this she was appointed as a feuilleton editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She covered the trial of holocaust denier David Irving in London and published her collected articles under the title Der Holocaust vor Gericht. Der Prozess um David Irving (The Holocaust before the Court. The Trial Surrounding David Irving). Subsequently, she continued her journalistic work as a cultural correspondent in Prague and Vienna.

In 2005, she published her debut novel Vienna, which turned out to be a great success and brought her wide attention and literary acclaim. The same year of publication, the novel received the Rolf Heyne Debütpreis. The novel is based on the history of her own family and has a collection of family anecdotes presented in a humorous yet highly sensitive and self-reflexive style.

The novel was followed by a volume of short stories Lässliche Todsünden (Pardonable Deadly Sins) and the novel Quasikristalle (Quasicrystals), published in 2009 and 2013 respectively. She was awarded the Gerty Spies Prize, the Alpha Literature Prize, and the Heinrich Böll Prize of the city of Cologne for her novel Quasikristalle which revolves around a woman's life from thirteen different perspectives, taking her from childhood to old age.

In 2015, her essay collection Lieber aufgeregt als abgeklärt was published. She has written a number of pieces on Austrian politics for the German press, including a commentary on the elections in Carinthia five months after Jörg Haider’s death, for Die Zeit.

Her latest publication Tiere für Fortgeschrittene (Advanced Studies in Animals) is a collection of short stories with each text beginning with a short scientific report about animals and then followed by the conclusions that can be drawn from animal behavior about human nature, thus animals being not animals but people, stuck with everyday chaos.

She was a fellow of the Villa Massimo in Rome and won the Jonathan Swift Award for satire and humor for her publication until now.
 
Since 2003, Eva Menasse lives and works in Berlin as a publicist and freelance author and is married to the German author Michael Kumpfmüller.
 
Menasse can be categorized as a second-generation Jewish writer, an Austrian writer and a woman writer, and this theme of multiple affiliations or situational identity lies at the heart of her novels and short stories. According to her, German readers appreciated her subdued critique of the persistence of latent anti-semitism in Austrian society, whereas Austrian readers expected more outrage.