Thomas Bernhard

Bernhard was born illegitimate in the Netherlands and raised largely by his grandfather, the writer Johannes Freumbichler, in provincial Austria. A grocer's apprenticeship in his teens exposed him to the damp cellar conditions that triggered the tuberculosis and lung disease that nearly killed him repeatedly and kept him in sanatoriums for years: an intimacy with death and Austrian institutional cruelty that became his lifelong subject and target.

He wrote in a single, unbroken, obsessively repetitive prose style across novels and a prolific string of plays, denouncing Austria's provincialism, its unexamined Nazi past, and the Catholic Church with a fury that made him the country's most reviled and celebrated writer at once; his play Heldenplatz caused a national uproar in 1988 for likening contemporary Austria to its Nazi years. His will forbade any new publication or staging of his work inside Austria, a ban his estate maintained for years after his death in 1989.