Nadja Spiegel

Already at the age of 16, Nadja Spiegel from Vorarlberg (AUSTRIA) has fully committed herself to literature. At eleven she first showed her German teacher a book she had written herself.

Nadja Spiegel has won the 2008 Austrian regional and federal speech contest.

At the time being she attends the HLW in Rankweil/AUSTRIA, takes singing and piano lessons in her spare time and would love to do "much, much more", if there were not only 24 hours in a day.

Her literary role models are Paul Celan, Oliver José or Simone Kornappel who are well present in her texts. However, the young writer has already partly developed her unique individual style.

Trying to describe her work, she first quotes Paul Celan: "Das Gedicht heute zeigt, das ist unverkennbar, eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen" (i.e.: Nowadays poetry clearly tends to fall silent). Furthermore she says "What I write is so sketchy and so sensitively silent, and yet full of words and expression? but it's difficult to describe myself anyway." But some aspects of her personality can be read out of her texts: her love for the language, her affection for metaphors which create visual texts or her predilection for very long sentences. Nadja?s works are gently woven and never banal; neither does she "beat about the bush".

Carefully she phrases: "I tend to use too many metaphors in my poems, so that they reach the limit of incomprehension; sometimes they even trespass this limit, but then I find it absolutely beautiful to see every sentence on its own. In this case I don't agree with Aristotle when he says: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I'd rather say: a fragment is more than only a part of the whole."

Thematically, the 16-year-old girl strictly distinguishes between lyric and prose. "To me, all abstract matters, probably any description of emotions and snap-shots go together with lyric poetry, but I've also tried to describe something concrete through lyric petry and something abstract through prose. But well, it remained an attempt."

As for her future prospects, Nadja would simply wish to have readers and says: "Every author would like to be heard. One doesn't sing, dance or play music just for oneself either. Eventually one reaches a point, where one wants to be understood, where one stops writing texts just for oneself, but for others to understand them. It's wonderful when one's words reach the reader."