Maria Lazar

Maria Lazar
She came from an upper middle-class Jewish Viennese family. From the early 1920s, she worked as a translator and wrote for Austrian, Scandinavian and Swiss newspapers. It was only when she adopted the pseudonym Esther Grenen in 1930 that she began to enjoy literary success. She left Austria in 1933 and lived first in Denmark and later in Sweden, where she died in 1948.

The poisoning
Maria Lazar wrote ‘The Poisoning’ in 1915, when she herself was only 20 years old. The novel tells the story of the adolescent rebel Ruth, her destructive love for an old chemist and her bitter fight against her mother's attempts to take control of her. An expressionist novel about the hypocritical world of the Viennese upper middle classes before the start of the First World War.

Read by Elisabeth Seethaler
Lives and works in Vienna. Ensemble member and production manager of ‘Tinte & Kaffee’. Numerous readings about extraordinary women in Austrian literature.

Photo: © DVB Verlag