Monica Pelz: Austria ★ Author

“I want to try to create a diff erentiated insight into the historical and social conditions of standards, values and world views to achieve a better understanding of different forms of life.”

Monica Pelz

Monika Pelz was born in Vienna in 1944. She worked as a journalist, secretary, and translator before she took up her formal studies in philosophy and history at university. She continues to combine her journalism, especially scientific journalism, with her novel writing. Pelz’s early writings for young readers combined realism with fantasy, but more recently her experience as a researcher and a journalist have become more evident as she has produced a number of historical novels and biographies. Her work has been translated into Japanese, Slovenian, Dutch, Korean and Chinese. Today she continues to live in Vienna and works as a freelance author.

Vienna is the setting for her provocative investigation of race and gender in Unternehmen Halbmond [Operation Half Moon]. On New Year’s Day, numerous Turkish teens—most of whom are Muslims—wake up to discover that they have changed sex: boys are now girls and vice versa. Convinced that this must be some form of punishment, but uncertain of their crimes, five of the aff ected teenagers investigate who or what is behind the change and venture beyond the limitations of gender they have previously adopted.

Pelz’s training as a journalist is evident in her detailed biography of Goethe, Den Blick auf das Herz der Welt. Die Lebensgeschichte des Johann Wolfgang Goethe. [Looking at the Heart of the World: The Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe]. This richly detailed account of the life, art and writing of the German polymath incorporates numerous quotations from Goethe’s own writings. Pelz provides a complex insight into Geothe’s private life, although she focuses on his development as a thinker.

Pelz’s subjects are not always such public figures, nor are her accounts always so factual. In her most recent novel, The Winchester Mystery, she takes up the story of the Winchester family to open up the history of race-relations in California. Sarah Winchester was the eccentric, childless daughter-in-law of William Winchester, the inventor of the repeat-loading rifle that was instrumental in the killing of the indigenous population. Sarah, one of the wealthiest women of her era, was convinced that the spirits of those killed by the rifle would enact their revenge if she completed construction of her California home.

Pelz’s other writings include works set in France during the enlightenment, biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Janusz Korczak, picture books, and fantasy. Her goal is to provoke her young readers to think more critically about the people and issues that inform history.