Ingeborg Bachmann

Bachmann studied philosophy in Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, writing a doctoral thesis on Heidegger, and became one of postwar German-language literature's most celebrated poets through the Group 47, deeply marked by her admiration for Musil's unfinished modernist epic.

Her relationships with Paul Celan and, later, Max Frisch shadowed both her private life and her fiction's obsession with erasure. Malina (1971), the only completed volume of a planned 'Ways of Dying' trilogy, splits an unnamed woman's identity between the safe, placid Ivan and the controlling, possibly murderous Malina, ending in one of postwar fiction's starkest images of a woman's disappearance.

Struggling with addiction and instability in her final years in Rome, she died there in 1973 from a fire in her apartment. Malina is now read as one of the century's essential novels of psychic violence against women.