Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian author and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, here meaning for Literature, is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction". Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's body of work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize.