Oswald Egger
Literature
Oswald Egger, born in 1963 in Lana, South Tyrol, is recognized as one of the most distinctive and linguistically inventive poets writing in German today. After studying literature and philosophy in Vienna, Egger helped shape the literary life of South Tyrol in the 1980s and 1990s as co-initiator and organizer of the Kulturtage Lana festival (1986–1995). From 1989 to 1998, he edited the influential literary magazine Der Prokurist in his own edition per procura, establishing a platform for experimental literature.
Egger’s work spans poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary projects, and has been translated into numerous languages. His poems appear regularly in leading anthologies, such as Der Große Conrady, and in renowned literary journals. With his unmistakable, multilayered linguistic artistry, Egger consistently blurs the boundaries between poetry, prose, and visual art—a practice for which he has received many honors, most recently the 2024 Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the German-speaking world.
He has held visiting professorships at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and the University of Bonn, and received fellowships from Villa Massimo in Rome and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since 2011, Egger has held the unique professorship for “Language and Form” at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel, a position that bridges literature, visual art, and design in both research and teaching.
Egger lives and works at the former Hombroich missile station near Neuss and in Vienna. His poetic landscapes, resistant to quick reading and inviting associative decoding, are deeply rooted in the multilingualism and geography of his South Tyrolean origins. Egger’s oeuvre stands for a literature that resists easy appropriation, continually reminding us of the unpossessable quality of art.