“Stefanie
Sargnagel
is the most
important
Austrian
writer
of the
21st
century.”
(VICE)
Stefanie Sargnagel writes radically subjective and very wise about the so-called simple life, about feminism, hopelessness and depression. She is taciturn, yet always strays into narrative, breaks all genre boundaries and achieves something on paths never trodden that you don’t have to call a novel to be captivated by it. It is often hilarious and sometimes tragic.
Sargnagel won the Audience Award at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with a text that she later used as material to develop her play “JA, EH!”, which opened the asphalt Festival in 2019. This year, on 27 and 28 June in the Weltkunstzimmer, we will be showing her new play “HEIL. Eine energetische Reinigung”, and the evening before the Viennese author brings a reading of humorous short texts to the Seebühne.
With her cool yet radical everyday observations, hilarious reportages, illustrations and Facebook postings, Stefanie Sargnagel hits a nerve in a unique way. She relentlessly exposes online what she sees as mendacious, fake, inadequate or simply hilarious.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung considers her the first German-language author who has found a form on the net that works as literature. At her performance on the Seebühne, Sargnagel offers a “best of” her career as a “social media heroine” and reads immensely entertainingly from her numerous Facebook postings.
Stefanie Sargnagel (civil name Stefanie Sprengnagel, *1986) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, among others in the class of Daniel Richter. But she spent more time at her day job in the call centre, because: “Whenever my professor Daniel Richter shows up at art student parties, suddenly everyone behaves as if God were speaking to his disciples. I never know how to deal with that, because I am God.” Sargnagel’s first novel, “Dicht. Aufzeichnungen einer Tagediebin” was published in 2020. In 2022, she held a visiting professorship in creative writing at Grinnell College in Iowa. Sargnagel’s trenchant commentary and observations are regularly published in German-language feuilleton.
– – –
The press says:
“Her everyday observations, aphorisms and adolescent raps hit a nerve.” (taz)
“One could perhaps even say that, with the exception of Rainald Goetz and his online diary ‘Abfall für alle’, she is the first German-language author to have found the form on the net that fits, that doesn’t annoy, that works as literature.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
“The entries always seem scattered, maybe they are – and yet the words and every non-existent punctuation are perfectly placed.” (DIE ZEIT)
by and with Stefanie Sargnagel
