In Amsterdam, Austrian writer Lilian Faschinger worked on a voluminous novel thematically and stucturally based on the thirty four Cantos from Dante’s Inferno. She collaborated intensively with her Dutch translator Ingeborg Lesener and was invited to deliver a guest lecture at the University of Amsterdam. Her novels Magdalena Sünderin (Magdalena zondares, 1996) and Wiener Passion (Weense passie, 2000) are translated in Dutch by Publishing house Ambo-Anthos. The Goethe Institut and the Austrian embassy supported the residency.
Lilian Faschinger is a prolific prose author, poet, and translator who, since her 1983 debut has produced five novels, three plays, two volumes of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and a number of literary translations. Faschinger was born in 1950 in Tschöran, a small town in Carinthia, and studied English literature and history at the University of Graz. She first attracted the widespread attention of the literary world in 1985 when she read extracts of her novel Die neue Scheherazade to the Klagenfurt jury that determines the winner of the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize.
Die neue Scheherazade established the satiric, feminist tone that informs much of Faschinger’s later work. Faschinger typically incorporates into her works a rigorous critique of Austrian society and the institution of the Church, as viewed from a woman’s perspective. She is a master at creating unique voices for her disparate protagonists, and for working into her texts an encyclopedic range of allusions to characters and situations from high and low culture, from the Bible to Batman, from Dante to Dracula.
