March 20, 1998 Prize-Winning Austrian Novelist Christoph Ransmayr To Read at Library of Congress

Press Contact: Yvonne French (202) 707-9191

Prize-winning Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr will read from his work at 6:45 p.m. April 6 in the Southeast Pavilion of the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, at 10 First Street S.E. Tickets are not required, but a response is requested by calling (202) 895-6776.

Mr. Ransmayr has written three novels. His first, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis), published in 1984, is a gripping, complex adventure interwoven with journal entries of the Royal Austro-Hungarian arctic expedition of 1872-74. His second, The Last World (Die letzte Welt) (1988), was a best-seller in Germany and won the Elias Canetti Fellowship and the Franz Kafka Literary Prize. For his most recent novel, The Dog King (Morbus Kitahara) (1995), Mr. Ransmayr shared the 1996 European Aristeion Prize with Salman Rushdie.

Among other awards Mr. Ransmayr has received are the Anton Wildgans Prize (1990), the Literary Award of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1992), and the Solothurn Prize (1997). Mr. Ransmayr currently lives in Ireland.

Mr. Ransmayr was born in Wels, Austria, in 1954. After studying philosophy and ethnology at the University of Vienna, he began his career as a cultural editor and reporter, publishing articles in the travel journals Extrablatt, Merian, Geo and especially Transatlantik. Today he is one of the most popular authors writing in German, and his novels have been translated into more than 20 languages.

The reading is being co-sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Embassy of Austria as part of "Encounters with the Most Acclaimed European Writers," a project initiated by the member states of the European Union and the European Commission in Washington to exemplify the originality, diversity and continued evolution of European cultures.

Previous and future readings in the series are as follows:

December 12, 1997
Finland - Anselm Hollo

February 10, 1998
United Kingdom - Lavinia Greenlaw

March 25, 1998
France - Assia Djebar

April 6, 1998
Austria - Christoph Ransmayr

May 1998
Greece

June 1998
Netherlands

July 1998
Spain

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PR 98-047
1998-03-20
ISSN 0731-3527