Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer

Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer (born 31 August 1936) is an Austrian novelist and poet, one of the leading women prose writers in German. Her mainly fictional works present the horrors of Fascism, especially the repression of minorities.

Early life and education Kerschbaumer was born in Garches near Paris where her Cuban father and Austrian mother were living to escape the Spanish Civil War. After spending her childhood years mainly in Costa Rica and the Austrian Tyrol, she worked in England for a year when she was 17 and then went on to Italy. In 1957, she returned to Austria to further her education. From 1963 she studied Romance languages at Vienna University and spent two years in Romania before earning a doctorate in Romanian linguistics in 1973. In 1971 she married the painter Helmut Kurz-Goldenstein. ) and was published as a popular paperback edition in 1982. Her third work, Schwestern (Sisters, 1982) is a novel tracing the experiences of several generations of an Austrian family as the events of the 20th century affect their lives. Kerschbaumer has also written plays which have been well received on Austrian radio but have not been published.

A number of Kerschbaumer's texts have been set to music by, among others, Olga Neuwirth, Ulf Dieter Soyka.