A false social media post triggered confusion and prompted news reports about the supposed death of one of Austria’s most famous living writers.
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.
Fake post fools media
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.
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Rowohlt rebuffed the announcement on its official social media, and the fake X account later posted a message confirming it had been a hoax.
Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2004. (Photo by HERBERT PFARRHOFER / AFP)
“This account is (a) hoax created by Italian journalist Tomm***o Debenedetti,” the account posted.
Not the first hoax
The name has been used for years in connection with pranks spreading false information online. Politicians have also been fooled by similar hoaxes, apparently carried out by the same person.
An Austrian lawmaker even requested a minute’s silence during a parliamentary meeting in 2022 for former Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, who had been declared dead in another false post by Debenedetti.
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Literary legacy
Jelinek is one of the most widely read and studied authors in the German language and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.
She is best known internationally for her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher, about a woman whose quest for self-mutilation and sado-masochism destroys her romance with a young student. The book was made into an award-winning film in 2001, earning Jelinek global recognition.
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