THE AUSTRIAN PROSE WRITER Barbara Neuwirth made her literary debut in 1990 with In den Gärten der Nacht, a volume of short stories that was published by Suhrkamp in its series “Phantastische Bibliothek.” Two years later, she published a second book, Dunkler Fluß des Lebens, which along with the first, established her reputation as one of today's most original contributors to the genre of fantasy fiction. Its stories are set intriguingly and at times indeterminately in an archaic past or a darkly envisioned future, in landscapes and cities that are at once familiar and magically alien. As with Kafka, whom Neuwirth resembles most closely in the precision and vividness of her descriptions, seemingly everyday events are drastically inverted to reveal the scary underside of human inner reality.

While Barbara Neuwirth acknowledges her debt to the Austrian tradition of fantasy literature as shaped by such writers as Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Kubin, and Leo Perutz, her work is thoroughly original. It derives from a modern feminist perspective and, further, incorporates no supernatural forces in order to explain its bizarre or unnatural motifs. Permitting her sixth sense to determine the direction of a story, she draws the reader into the depths of her elemental human conflicts and romantically seductive landscapes (which, as she relates, are inspired by the Waldviertel of her native Lower Austria). She prompts her readers to find creative answers to the questions she poses by exploring their own inner life and the forces that emerge from it.

Barbara Neuwirth's overarching theme is man's betrayal of life's nurturing and preserving powers — above all, love. Among the forms in which such betrayal arises in her stories are modern science demonically unbound from morality, totalitarianism, and the brutal male exploitation of woman's love (which is typically infused with a delicate eroticism). The visions Neuwirth reflects are unsettlingly dark, yet her work suggests that amid tragic betrayal there exists an opening toward hope and moral action.

An academically trained social anthropologist, Barbara Neuwirth works in Vienna as science editor of the Wiener Frauenverlag, the sole feminist publishing house in Austria. In interviews, she has stressed the importance for her of remaining active as a social scientist who places the highest moral demands on science as well as art.