The Most Famous

WRITERS from Austria

This page contains a list of the greatest Austrian Writers. The pantheon dataset contains 7,302 Writers, 68 of which were born in Austria. This makes Austria the birth place of the 19th most number of Writers behind Norway, and Hungary.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Austrian Writers of all time. This list of famous Austrian Writers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Austrian Writers.

1. Stefan Zweig (1881 - 1942)

With an HPI of 79.72, Stefan Zweig is the most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 83 different languages on wikipedia.

Stefan Zweig (; German: [ˈʃtɛ.fan t͡svaɪ̯k] ; 28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters), and decisive historical events in Decisive Moments in History (1927). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941). In 1934, as a result of the Nazi Party's rise in Germany and the establishment of the Ständestaat regime in Austria, Zweig emigrated to England and then, in 1940, moved briefly to New York and then to Brazil, where he settled. In his final years, he would declare himself in love with the country, writing about it in the book Brazil, Land of the Future. Nonetheless, as the years passed Zweig became increasingly disillusioned and despairing at the future of Europe, and he and his wife Lotte were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in Petrópolis on 23 February 1942; they had died the previous day. His work has been the basis for several film adaptations. Zweig's memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, 1942), is noted for its description of life during the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Franz Joseph I and has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.

2. Robert Musil (1880 - 1942)

With an HPI of 71.46, Robert Musil is the 2nd most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 60 different languages.

Robert Musil (German: [ˈʁoːbɛʁt ˈmuːzɪl]; 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.

3. Paula Hitler (1896 - 1960)

With an HPI of 71.32, Paula Hitler is the 3rd most famous Austrian Writer. Her biography has been translated into 34 different languages.

Paula Hitler, also known as Paula Wolff and Paula Hitler-Wolff, (21 January 1896 – 1 June 1960) was the younger sister of Adolf Hitler and the last child of Alois Hitler and his third wife, Klara Pölzl.

4. Peter Handke (b. 1942)

With an HPI of 71.22, Peter Handke is the 4th most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 79 different languages.

Peter Handke (German pronunciation: [ˈpeːtɐ ˈhantkə]; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Handke is considered to be one of the most influential and original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century. In the late 1960s, he earned his reputation as a member of the avant-garde with such plays as Offending the Audience (1966) in which actors analyze the nature of theatre and alternately insult the audience and praise its "performance", and Kaspar (1967). His novels, mostly ultra objective, deadpan accounts of characters in extreme states of mind, include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) and The Left-Handed Woman (1976). Prompted by his mother's suicide in 1971, he reflected her life in the novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972). A dominant theme of his works is the deadening effects and underlying irrationality of ordinary language, everyday reality, and rational order. Handke was a member of the Grazer Gruppe (an association of authors) and the Grazer Autorenversammlung, and co-founded the Verlag der Autoren publishing house in Frankfurt. He collaborated with director Wim Wenders, and wrote such screenplays as The Wrong Move and Wings of Desire. In 1973, he won the Georg Büchner Prize, the most important literary prize for German-language literature. In 1999, as a protest against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Handke returned the prize money to the German Academy for Language and Literature. Handke has drawn significant controversy for his public support of Serbian nationalism in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars.

5. Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888 - 1970)

With an HPI of 70.63, Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the 5th most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 83 different languages.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Hebrew: שמואל יוסף עגנון; August 8, 1887 – February 17, 1970) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon (ש"י עגנון‎). In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon. Agnon was born in Polish Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Jerusalem. His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl (village). In a wider context, he also contributed to broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator's role in literature. Agnon had a distinctive linguistic style, mixing modern and rabbinic Hebrew. In 1966, he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs.

6. Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946)

With an HPI of 70.29, Elfriede Jelinek is the 6th most famous Austrian Writer. Her biography has been translated into 103 different languages.

Elfriede Jelinek (German: [ɛlˈfʁiːdə ˈjɛlinɛk]; born 20 October 1946) is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.

7. Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)

With an HPI of 69.74, Peter Drucker is the 7th most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 45 different languages.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (; German: [ˈdʀʊkɐ]; November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and invented the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the champion of management as a serious discipline". Drucker's books and articles, both scholarly and popular, explored how humans are organized across the business, government, and nonprofit sectors of society. He is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice. His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning. In 1959, Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker", and later in his life considered knowledge-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.

8. Arthur Schnitzler (1862 - 1931)

With an HPI of 69.34, Arthur Schnitzler is the 8th most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 54 different languages.

Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 – 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist. He is considered one of the most significant representatives of Viennese Modernism. Schnitzler’s works, which include psychological dramas and narratives, dissected turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeois life, making him a sharp and stylistically conscious chronicler of Viennese society around 1900.

9. Maria Leopoldina of Austria (1797 - 1826)

With an HPI of 67.05, Maria Leopoldina of Austria is the 9th most famous Austrian Writer. Her biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

Dona Maria Leopoldina of Austria (22 January 1797 – 11 December 1826) was the first Empress of Brazil as the wife of Emperor Dom Pedro I from 12 October 1822 until her death. She was also Queen of Portugal during her husband's brief reign as King Dom Pedro IV from 10 March to 2 May 1826. She was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, and his second wife, Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily. Among her many siblings were Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria and Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma, the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. The education Maria Leopoldina had received in childhood and adolescence was broad and eclectic, with a higher cultural level and more consistent political training. Such education of the little princes and princesses of the Habsburg family was based on the educational belief initiated by their grandfather Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, who believed "that children should be inspired from an early age to have high qualities, such as humanity, compassion and the desire to make people happy". With a deep Christian faith and a solid scientific and cultural background (which included international politics and notions of government) the Archduchess had been prepared from an early age to being a proper royal consort. In the 21st century, it has been proposed by some historians that she was one of the main articulators of the process of Independence of Brazil that took place in 1822. Her biographer, historian Paulo Rezzutti, maintains that it was largely thanks to her that Brazil became a nation. According to him, the wife of Dom Pedro "embraced Brazil as her country, Brazilians as her people and Independence as her cause". She was also adviser to Dom Pedro on important political decisions that reflected the future of the nation, such as the Dia do Fico and the subsequent opposition and disobedience to the Portuguese courts regarding the couple's return to Portugal. Consequently, for governing the country on Dom Pedro's trips through the Brazilian provinces, she is considered the first woman to become head of state in an independent American country.

10. Gustav Meyrink (1868 - 1932)

With an HPI of 66.19, Gustav Meyrink is the 10th most famous Austrian Writer. His biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

Gustav Meyrink (19 January 1868 – 4 December 1932) was the pseudonym of Gustav Meyer, an Austrian author, novelist, dramatist, translator, and banker, most famous for his novel The Golem. He has been described as the "most respected German language writer in the field of supernatural fiction".

People

Pantheon has 81 people classified as Austrian writers born between 1060 and 1969. Of these 81, 14 (17.28%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Austrian writers include Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Klaus Ebner. The most famous deceased Austrian writers include Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, and Paula Hitler. As of April 2024, 13 new Austrian writers have been added to Pantheon including Pauline von Metternich, Ulrich von Liechtenstein, and Alfréd Wetzler.