Klaus Ebner - Work

Work

Since graduating from school, Ebner has written short prose, poetry and radio plays. His work has been published in literary and cultural magazines such as Sterz, one of the largest literary magazine from Styria, Austria, and in Lesezirkel, which was owned by the Viennese daily newspaper Wiener Zeitung. The topic of his 1988 master's thesis (Diplomarbeit), written in French, was titled "The Image of the Catalan Countries in French literature from Romanticism till Today". Excerpts of a Catalan Diary, containing travel journals and comments on Catalan culture, were published in 1987, and in several essays he discusses Catalan culture.

Increasing professional obligations after the birth of his first son in 1987 coincided with a reduction in his literary output. During the 1990s he instead focused his attention on his novel Feuers Geraun. Two early versions of this novel's chapters were published by the Upper Austrian magazine die Rampe in 1994 (Der Schreiber von Aram) and 1997 (Das Gesetz). These chapters deal with Jewish and biblical traditions. The publishing list on Ebner's website lists only six publications in anthologies by 2004, but seventeen are listed from between 2005 and 2008.

Ebner has additionally written narrative fiction (novels, short stories, short prose), essays and poems. His poetry is written in German and Catalan. Supported by a subsidy for literature from the Austrian government, he went to Andorra in 2007 to write an essay about the country in the Pyrenees. He also translated the novel L'Absent written by the Catalan author Josep Navarro Santaeulàlia, into German. Ebner's cultural essays about Catalan culture, such as that of Barcelona and Andorra, have been published by the magazines Literatur und Kritik and Zitig. His first collection of short stories, Lose (Destinies), was published in 2007. Of its 45 stories, twenty-two had already been printed in newspapers, literary magazines or anthologies. In 2008, Ebner published two other books of narrative fiction, among them the short novel Hominide.