Background
Kerschbaumer was born in Garches near Paris where her Cuban father and Austrian mother were living to escape the Spanish Civil War.
Kerschbaumer was born in Garches near Paris where her Cuban father and Austrian mother were living to escape the Spanish Civil War.
From 1963, she studied Romance languages at Vienna University and spent two years in Romania before earning a doctorate in Romanian linguistics in 1973.
After spending her childhood years mainly in Costa Rica and the Austrian Tyrol, she worked in England for a year when she was 17 and then went on to Italy. In 1957, she returned to Austria to further her education. After completing her studies, Kerschbaumer worked as a translator, mainly from Spanish.
Her first novel, Der Schwimmer (The Swimmer) was published in 1976, describing how inmates tried to escape from an institution in Franco"s Spain.
In 1980, she gained fame by publishing Der weibliche Name des Widerstands (The Feminine Name of Resistance) consisting of seven fictional accounts of women in Nazi concentration camps. Her third work, Schwestern (Sisters, 1982) is a novel tracing the experiences of several generations of an Austrian family as the events of the 20th century affect their lives.
Kerschbaumer has also written plays which have been well received on Austrian radio but have not been published. From 1992 to 2000, she wrote the three novels of the Die Fremde series, an autobiographical trilogy tracing the life of a girl born in the Austrian alps, who goes to France and England before studying Italian language and art in Tuscany.
Her most recent work, Wasser und Wind (Water and Wind, 2006) is a collection of poems written from 1988 and 2005.
Her mainly fictional works present the horrors of Fascism, especially the repression of minorities.