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Erich Hackl

Author

Born in Steyr, Austria, in 1954, Erich Hackl studied German and Hispanic Studies and worked for a number of years as a teacher and editor. Madrid and Vienna, where he works as a writer and translator, have been home to him for a long time now. Both his literary work and journalism are concerned with finding connections between those who are unable to come to terms with current injustice and others who have felt indignation in the past and no longer want to be alone with this. His stories, translated into twenty-four languages, are based on authentic cases. Erich Hackl’s books have been published in 25 languages.

»Erich Hackl's concise and hauntingly dense works of prose have gained him a huge audience and great success. At the bottom of his efforts are usually some forgotten beings, victims of our century's cruel history, with their authentic albeit not exactly remembered biography. Here Hackl, the Austrian author, overly sensitized perhaps because of his own country's extreme insensitivities, steps in and tries to bring about an act of belated justice and redemption. This obviates the question whether Hackl is a fiction writer or a historian, a lawyer of the ›small people‹ or a missionary voice of human dignity: he is all of these, and ideally they all add up to make a writer.«World Literature Today

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