Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek told AFP on Tuesday that she was alive and well, after German-speaking media reported a fake announcement that the writer had died.
“Again? This is the second time I’ve died. It already happened last year. But I’m alive,” the 78-year-old writer told AFP.
Jelinek, one of the most widely read and studied authors in the German language, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.
The false announcement came from an account on social media platform X posing as the Austrian subsidiary of Germany’s Rowohlt publishing house.
The information was picked up and published by Austrian and German media outlets.
Rowohlt rebuffed the announcement on its official social media and the fake X account later posted a message confirming it had been a hoax.
“This account is (a) hoax created by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti,” the account posted.
The name has been used for years in connection with pranks spreading false information online.
Politicians have also been fooled by pranks apparently carried out by the same person.
An Austrian lawmaker requested a minute’s silence during a parliamentary meeting in 2022 as a tribute to former Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, who had been declared dead by Debenedetti.
Jelinek is best known for her 1983 novel “The Piano Teacher”, about a woman whose quest for self-mutilation and sado-masochim destroys her romance with a young student.
The book was made into an award-winning film in 2001 and won Jelinek fame outside the German-speaking world.
