Margret Kreidl – Language Artist Bridging Poetry, Drama, and Audio Play

An Austrian author who composes, performs, and continually reinvents language

Margret Kreidl, born on January 2, 1964, in Salzburg, is one of the most versatile voices in contemporary Austrian literature. Her music career in the conventional sense does not exist—but her poetry, theater texts, libretti, and audio plays unfold a rhythmic, sound-conscious power that acts like a composition. Since the 1990s, Kreidl has shaped the literary scene with books, stage works, and radio productions, guided by an artistic development that understands language as both material and stage. Today, the author lives in Vienna, where she writes, teaches, and impresses with her tireless stage presence at readings.

Biography: From Salzburg to Vienna – a Consistent Artistic Development

Growing up in the Flachgau region near Salzburg, Kreidl moved to Graz in 1983, where she lived until 1996 while sharpening her literary profile. Since then, Vienna has been her home base—a hub for her writing, performances, and her close ties to the Austrian cultural landscape. International experiences broadened her perspective: in 2003, she was a writer in residence at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and in 2018 she was a fellow at Bodmanhaus in Gottlieben. These stations shaped her experience as an author whose texts always seek dialogue with other arts and place the sensual presence of language at the center. Her partnership with author and theater and audio play director Lucas Cejpek deepens the connection between literature, stage, and sound-conscious thinking. ([de.wikipedia.org](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Teaching and Mentoring: Writing Workshops as a Laboratory of Aesthetics

Since 2015, Kreidl has been teaching at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna in the field of “Aesthetics and Creative Writing Workshop.” She teaches aspiring theater makers and authors how composition, arrangement, and voice work together in text. This expertise is drawn from her own practice—from precise prose miniatures to libretti to audio plays, where timing, timbre, and speech gesture matter. Her teaching also includes workshops at schools and adult education institutions throughout the German-speaking world. The educational foundation of her work emphasizes the connection between literary production and reflective writing didactics. ([de.wikipedia.org](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Awards: Authority through Prizes and Continuous Recognition

The response to Kreidl's work is broad and stable over decades. In 1994, she received the prestigious Reinhard-Priessnitz Prize. This was followed by the Outstanding Artist Award for Literature (2018) and the City of Vienna Prize for Literature (2021)—awards that establish her authority in contemporary literature. In 2024, the city of Vienna awarded Kreidl the H. C.-Artmann-Preis, the highest endowed poetry prize in Vienna. The jury praised her versatility, her inexhaustible linguistic cosmos, and her ability to address social issues pointedly, humorously, and concretely. These awards mark milestones in a musicality of language that Kreidl has cultivated for decades. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Aesthetics and Style: When Language Breathes, Sounds, and Performs

Kreidl's texts work with a pronounced sensitivity to rhythm, meter, and recurrence. Whether as a poem, monologue, or audio play: her compositions unfold musical logics—guidance of themes, variation, counterpoint between image and thought. A key example is the volume “Schlüssel zum Offenen” (Edition Korrespondenzen, 2021), which playfully employs formal rules such as acrostics and seven-line verses to create poetic movements. The Poetry Recommendations 2022 highlight Kreidl's wit, precision, and her sense of contemporary political references; the texts elegantly swing between free verse, rhyme, lists, and line breaks. This artistic development shows how consistently Kreidl understands form as a motor of meaning and emotion. ([lyrik-empfehlungen.de](https://www.lyrik-empfehlungen.de/2022/empfehlungen/margret-kreidl-schluessel-zum-offenen?utm_source=openai))

Works and Bibliography: Volumes, Stages, Voices

Margret Kreidl has been continuously publishing poetry and prose volumes, as well as dramatic texts, since the mid-1990s. Early books such as “Ich bin eine Königin. Auftritte” (1996) and “In allen Einzelheiten. Katalog” (1998) already established her penchant for performative title poetics, while later works—among them “Zitat, Zikade. Zu den Sätzen” (2017) and “Schlüssel zum Offenen. Gedichte” (2021)—expand and condense the repertoire. In 2023, she released “Mehr Frauen als Antworten. Gedichte mit Fußnoten,” a volume that thematically focuses on diversity of voices and perspective shifts. As a librettist and dramatist, Kreidl considers voice, body, and space; in the audio play, she utilizes sound architecture, noise, and speech acts to bring together literary figures and atmosphere. ([wien.gv.at](https://www.wien.gv.at/video/3421/Margaret-Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Audio Play, Libretto, Theater: Composition for Voices

In the audio play, Kreidl's particular expertise in sound dramaturgy unfolds. Since 1989, she has been regularly writing radio pieces, many for ORF. Examples such as “Eine Schwalbe falten” or works connected with compositions of collaborating musicians illustrate her practice of intertwining literature with auditory art. Language remains physical on stage: Kreidl's theater texts demand direction and ensemble as partners of an open, sensual text score—a “complicated language artwork” that challenges rather than illustrates the staging. This attitude is supported by publishers and theaters and continuously tested in performances and readings. ([wien.gv.at](https://www.wien.gv.at/video/3421/Margaret-Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Current Projects 2024–2025: Awards, Readings, Public Presence

The year 2024 marked a prominent highlight with the awarding of the H. C.-Artmann-Preis. The justification from the City of Vienna emphasizes Kreidl's dialogical poetry and her confident shifts between poetic techniques. In 2025, Kreidl remained present on reading stages: Literature houses and organizers announced appearances and readings—including presentations of unpublished texts and program series focusing on her latest poetry collections. These appearances underscore her stage presence and interaction with the audience and scene. ([korrespondenzen.at](https://korrespondenzen.at/aktuelles/?utm_source=openai))

Reception: Reviews, Canonization, Literary Musicality

Reviews and jury texts emphasize Kreidl's ability to transform the seemingly small—everyday observations, formal games, quotes—into a grand poetic movement. The Poetry Recommendations 2022 highlighted the formally aware lightness and the effortless wit that nevertheless touches on the political. In the practice of composition and arrangement of her texts lies a key reason for the lasting impact: recurrence, variation, surprising pause, and the orchestral interplay of voices—as lines of poetry, figures, or sound motifs—create an unmistakable tone. This critical reception has led to a sustained canonization within the realm of contemporary Austrian literature. ([lyrik-empfehlungen.de](https://www.lyrik-empfehlungen.de/2022/empfehlungen/margret-kreidl-schluessel-zum-offenen?utm_source=openai))

Cultural Influence: Language as Public Space

Kreidl understands literature as part of the public space—in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Text installations, readings, and radio productions open her literature to diverse audiences: in urban spaces, in theaters, in the ether. Her work as an educator institutionalizes this attitude by sensitizing new generations to the aesthetic precision of word choice, rhythm, and speakability. As an award-winning author with years of practice, she embodies trust in poetry as a contemporary art form—discussive, sensual, and accessible. ([de.wikipedia.org](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Form Analysis: Technique, Genre, Production

Kreidl's work connects poetic technique with dramatic clarity. In poetry, she employs fixed patterns (acrostics, seven-line verses) as well as free forms that develop an inner pulse through meter and enjambment. Dramatic texts and libretti resemble scores in which roles, chorus, dialogue, and silence are precisely set—an arrangement that inspires directorial decisions rather than determining them. In radio art, Kreidl uses microphone proximity, multitracking, and sound spaces, whereby voice becomes composition. This production aesthetic explains why her readings possess a performative weight reminiscent of chamber music: concentrated, precise, sound-conscious. ([lyrik-empfehlungen.de](https://www.lyrik-empfehlungen.de/2022/empfehlungen/margret-kreidl-schluessel-zum-offenen?utm_source=openai))

Stations of Musicality in Language

Even without a “discography” in the stricter sense, Kreidl's work bears a distinct musical signature: tempo and pauses, starts and refrains, thematic returns of images. Her poetry collections, in this sense, form cycles that pick up, link, and re-tune thematic threads over the years. That juries and publishers recognize this long-standing artistic development is reflected in the major awards of the 2010s and 2020s—a continuous proof of expertise and credibility in the literary public sphere. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Kreidl?utm_source=openai))

Conclusion: Why Read Margret Kreidl Now – and Experience Her Live?

If you are looking for literature today that is cleverly composed, sensually speaks, and remains socially aware, Margret Kreidl is an author of remarkable relevance. Her texts show how form becomes an instrument of understanding, how humor and seriousness resonate together, how poetry connects the moment and the state of the world. When read live, these works gain additional intensity—as an immediate theater of voices that creates closeness and rewards concentration. Recommendation: Read Kreidl, listen to her, experience her in conversation—and discover the long breath of an author whose work continues to grow.

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Margret Kreidl