the improvement of all of austria

call for texts / literature contest

the improvement of all of austria

organiser

vienna poetry school in association with the guest of honour project "meaoiswiamia" at the leipzig book fair 2023.

event and award ceremony

a literary competition, let god have mercy. with announcement and celebration of the winners during the great all-austria improvement gala event on 29 april 2023 at the schaubühne lindenfels in leipzig, presented by a model couple of german-austrian enmity/friendship, dirk stermann & christoph grissemann.

idea and call

german and swiss authors (austrian authors are also allowed to participate anyway) parody, ironise, caricature, distort or overwrite austrian poetry or that which is haunted by the german-language feature pages as a literary cliché of austria.
austrian literature is said to have a lot of things going for it: its main characteristics are negation, coldness, bleakness, the manic and the moribund and a general pessimism that gives vent to itself in scolding and reviling everything and everyone. poetry as an all-encompassing negation, as a great anti. to name just the tip of this iceberg: thomas bernhard, elfriede jelinek, josef winkler, werner schwab, werner kofler, lydia haider and so on.
on the other hand, however, "austrian" is also considered a predicate in terms of unacademic joy in experimentation and mischievous love of language with a simultaneous radical scepticism of language. top names here: ernst jandl, friederike mayröcker, elfriede gerstl, h. c. artmann, wolfgang bauer, ann cotten, raphaela edelbauer, clemens setz and many more.
we are now looking for parodies of the well-known canon as well as samples of new all-shit novels. we are hungry for austrian short stories full of misery and self-pity and are happy to receive exposés of an anti-home novel to end all anti-home novels. we're looking for dialect poems and experimental jokes, dreary screenplays for ulrich seidl, cigarette ads for ingeborg bachmann or cyberneticist jokes for oswald wiener - in short, texts that confirm prejudices with relish and add to the popular austrian discipline of "distorting to recognizability" with german thoroughness.
the goal: a literary escalation of austrianism and in the end - the crazy austrianisation of all participants.
but so that the whole thing doesn't degenerate into protestant work, we want to introduce a catholic upper limit: 3,000 characters should be enough.

further info (prizes, terms & conditions, participation - in german) >> http://sfd.at/leipzig23