Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist and playwright, one of the most distinctive and uncompromising voices in postwar European literature, known for his ranting, repetitive, savagely funny monologues and his relentless misanthropy, in works such as The Loser and Wittgenstein's Nephew.

Thomas Bernhard developed one of the most unmistakable styles in modern literature: long, unbroken, obsessively repetitive monologues of savage wit and misanthropy, often directed against his native Austria, its culture, and its hypocrisies. Sickly from youth and preoccupied with illness and death, he turned his bleak vision into a darkly comic art unlike anyone else’s.

His novels — including The Loser, Woodcutters, Correction, and the part-memoir Wittgenstein’s Nephew — and his provocative plays made him a central and controversial figure in postwar European letters, admired for the hypnotic brilliance of his prose and the ferocity of his vision. His will notoriously forbade the publication or performance of his work in Austria after his death.

Bernhard died in 1989. He is now regarded as one of the major writers of the twentieth century, a master of the comic-misanthropic monologue whose influence on contemporary literature is profound.