Marie Luise Kaschnitz

Marie Luise Kaschnitz (born Marie Luise von Holzing-Berslett in Karlsruhe, 31 January 1901 – died in Rome, 10 October 1974) was a German writer of short stories, novels, essays and poems. She is generally counted among the leading German poets of the post-war years. Her work sits at the meeting point of personal memory, travel and the aftermath of the Second World War.

The daughter of a major general, she trained as a librarian in Weimar. She later worked for a publishing house in Munich and then for a bookshop in Rome. In 1925 she married the archaeologist Guido Freiherr von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, known for his work on the Mediterranean roots of ancient art, and travelled with him on archaeological trips. The couple lived in Rome, Königsberg, Marburg and Frankfurt am Main. From 1941 she settled in Frankfurt for good, and after her husband's death in 1958 she spent periods at the family house in Bollschweil, near Freiburg im Breisgau.

Her short stories, written in a psychological vein, are perhaps her best-known work. They often draw on her own life and focus on moments in a woman's life or in a relationship rather than on dramatic events. Her main collection is Lange Schatten, and she counted Das dicke Kind among her favourites. Her poems deal with the war and its aftermath, often longing for a peaceful past while keeping a hope for the future. After her husband died she wrote about her grief in Dein Schweigen – meine Stimme, and after 1960 she came under the influence of Pablo Neruda. Travel and changes of place shaped much of her writing, which also includes essays and autobiographical reflections.

She won many prizes, among them the Georg Büchner Prize in 1955 and the Roswitha Prize in 1973, and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1965 and 1967. The Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize, created by the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing in 1984, bears her name. Her stories and poems are now read in several languages, including Spanish.