Autobiography (engl.)
I was born in Vienna on August 8, 1964. My mother worked as a hairdresser at that time, my father was a business employee, and during the 1970s he worked as representative and sales manager in the entertainment electronics industry. My sister was born in 1969. For eight years, I attended Secondary School in the 2nd district of Vienna. My first writing attempts date from this time. I remember having written at the age of twelve a short play which was rehearsed for a while with my school friends but never performed. Later I submitted pieces of prose and poems to literature competitions for juveniles, together with my friend Peter Seifert (1963-1994). I spent most of my leisure time reading: first science-fiction and then world literature. In addition I learned to love foreign languages and cultures. In 1981, Peter and I went on a one-month trip (Interrail) across Europe which led us to Morocco, France and finally Denmark via Italy and the Iberian peninsula. In the subsequent years, I traveled several times through France, Italy, Andorra and Catalonia.
After graduation from school and a summer university stay in Tours, France, I started translation studies for French and Italian in 1982, which I completed in 1989. In addition, I studied Romance and German philology from 1983 to 1988; I graduated with the Austrian master degree in philosophy. In the German department I had the opportunity to learn some Yiddish and to get acquainted with the Jewish culture. For the Romance Language Department I wrote my dissertation about the image of the Catalan Countries in French literature from Romanticism till today; this work has been written in French. Even before graduation I began to offer my services as a freelance translator and specialized in technology, particularly computer technology. From 1998 to 2002 I attended the University of Applied Sciences for European Management, which provided me also with basic knowledge in Russian.
After the end of the 1980s I started to teach computer software and to write non-fictional books about office software and networks; the first of these books, published in 1989 by Data Becker in Germany, covered the word processing software WordPerfect and was translated shortly after into Dutch. Thus, nine IT books came out until 2004. My freelance training activity ended in 1996 due to unfavorable changes of the Austrian Social Security law. Fortunately I found myself hired by a multinational IT company in the same year. In the fall of 1999, I spent six weeks in North Carolina in the United States of America where I was the co-author of an English reference book about PC servers. By 2002 I began to work in project management, mostly in the context of education projects for public customers in Austria. However, I continued my translation activities on a freelance basis.
In the 1990s I authored more than one hundred professional articles for Austrian, German and British EDP magazines. With hindsight, I count this phase as an important step with regard to my stylistic evolution. Eventually I began to write philological articles, especially in the field of Catalan language studies, and contributed to philological journals, such as the Germany based Zeitschrift für Katalanistik (Journal of Catalan Studies) and the Austrian Europa Ethnica.
I have four children, three sons and one daughter with whom I exclusively speak French, since their bilingual education is a concern to me.
In 1982, I was awarded the Erster Österreichischer Jugendpreis (Youth Prize) for literature. The winning text, a novella about a civil servant who gets to know a Jewish pensioner who had been prosecuted during the Nazi regime, was printed one year later in the Israeli German language daily newspaper Israel-Nachrichten. The critic Hans Weigel, member of the literature award jury, had been very impressed by the text. In retrospect I think that this early success turned out to be rather an obstacle to my development as a writer because it conveyed a false picture of the capabilities I had at that time. I became a member of the Austrian Writers\' Association in 1986. My novel Nils was honored another Youth Prize in 1988 although it has never been finished; however, the first chapter of this novel was published by an Austrian literary magazine (Literatur aus Österreich) in 1992, and I added some fragments to my diary which I had initiated in the early 1980s.
After the birth of my first son and an increase of various professional obligations, my literary ambitions had to step back for a while. In the 1990s I published fiction only sporadically. Nevertheless, I began to write the novel Feuers Geraun, of which two chapters were printed by the magazine Die Rampe in Upper Austria (Der Schreiber von Aram and Das Gesetz). By about 2004 I turned back to the path of writing and intensified my literary activities; hence I published many more stories, essays and poems than ever before. In 2006, I became a member of the Austrian writers\' association Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung, in 2010 of the Catalan association Associació d\'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, and in 2013 of the Catalan P.E.N. – PEN Català.
Since 2016, I live in Schwechat, close to Vienna as well as to the airport.