Writing archives: Valerie Fritsch

As part of Austria’s appearance as a guest country at the Leipzig Book Fair 2023, a film archive of contemporary Austrian literature is being created in collaboration with ORF TV under the title “Archive des Writings”, making contemporary Austrian authors accessible to a wide audience in short, aesthetically and content-evolving personal portraits. Valeire Fritsch can be seen in the new episode.

She achieved her breakthrough with her second novel, Winters Garten, and Graz-based photo artist and author Valerie Fritsch has since become a staple of German-language literature. In the writing archives, she tells us how important it is to endure the simultaneous horror and beauty of the world, and how lucky she was to find the remote control. In the end, it’s about getting a closer look at an “anatomical” view.

In an interview, she said: “At some point I noticed that you can travel anywhere, even if you didn’t imagine it at first.” Negative biases usually outweigh before experience shows you the truth. “Traveling has increased my understanding of the world, and how different things can be. The other and also the terrible and the poor – what does that look like? You are often so far away from it.”

You can see Valerie Fritsch at the ORF Topos Player in the latest photo from the Writing Archives series, below Link.⁠