Stefanie Sargnagel - ließt aus "Iowa"

In the organizer's words:

"Stefanie Sargnagel is the most important Austrian author of the 21st century."

VICE Alps already wrote this at the end of 2013, when Sargnagel's debut work Binge Living was published and became the surprise bestseller of the 2013 Austrian Christmas book season.

Numerous Austrian media included it in their annual bestseller lists, and listeners of the youth station

FM4 youth radio station even voted it Book of the Year. Hyped by feature pages and hipster blogs alike, the first editions sold out within a short space of time. The second book Fitness, published in 2015, has now also made the leap to Germany. The recipe is the same as for Binge Living: Facebook postings, crazy reports and illustrations (Sargnagel studied painting with Daniel Richter at the Academy of Fine Arts) are condensed into a powerful stream of consciousness that exposes with relentless staccato what in Steffi's eyes is dishonest, fake, inadequate or simply hilarious.

At the same time, Sargnagel also became a left-wing figurehead around the publication of Fitness ; her battles and fights on Facebook with/against right-wing extremists and/or the FPÖ earned her heroine status and are almost as legendary as her books.

Sargnagel writes radically subjectively and very wisely about the so-called simple life, about feminism, hopelessness and depression. She is taciturn, but always gets into narrative, draws something in between and breaks all genre boundaries. It is often hilarious, sometimes tragic.

Following Sargnagel's move to the renowned Rowohlt publishing house, his first novel, Dicht - Aufzeichnungen einer Tagediebin, was published in2018. Stefanie's second novel, Iowa, about her time as a lecturer at a small college in the USA, was published in 2023.

Stefanie Sargnagel received the audience award at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize competition in Klagenfurt in 2016 and the jury prize at the Prix Pantheon in Bonn in 2022.

Her two books Statusmeldungen and Dicht were bestsellers, Statusmeldungen was made into a movie.