Anna Baar

Born 1973 in Zagreb in former Yugoslavia as the daughter of a Dalmatian mother and an Austrian father, Anna Baar spent her childhood and youth in Austria – between Vienna and Klagenfurt – and on the Dalmatian island of Brač. She studied Journalism and Public Relations at the University of Vienna and the University of Klagenfurt, where she earned her PhD in 2008. As a student, she worked for radio and print media and after her graduation she worked as a free-lancer in the fields of the economy, science and arts. 

Since 2012 Anna Baar published numerous short stories, essays and poems in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel “Die Farbe des Granatapfels” (Wallstein) — The Color of the Pomegranate — was published in 2015. An excerpt from the manuscript was shortlisted  for the Bachmann Prize at the Festival of German-Language Literature 2015. The novel was ranked number 1 on the ORF Best List for three months and was awarded the Rotahorn Literature Prize. For her second novel “Als ob sie träumend gingen” (2017, Wallstein) – As If They Were Walking in a Dream – Baar received the Theodor Körner Prize.    

Reviewers often praise Anna Baar’s extraordinary sense of language. She composes her stories like pieces of music in a very distinctive, pictorial, expressive narrative tone – associatively and at the same time sharply contoured on the border between fact and imagination. The Austrian critic Julia Kospach calls her "one of the boldest voices of contemporary German-language literature”.

Anna Baar lives in Klagenfurt and Vienna.