Gerhild Steinbuch, born in 1983 in Mödling (Austria), writes plays, libretti, radio plays, and essays, and translates from English. Since 2020, she has headed the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her plays have been staged at venues including the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Münchner Kammerspiele, and the Schaubühne Berlin.
Her translations include plays by Alice Birch, Chris Bush, David Ireland, Adena Jacobs and Alexander Zeldin, among others.
Steinbuch studied playwriting in Graz and dramaturgy at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. For her debut play, kopftot, she received the Retzhofer Literature Prize in 2003 and won the Schaubühne Berlin playwriting competition. This was followed by further prizes, awards, and fellowships, including the Reinhard Priessnitz Prize from the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the City of Graz Literaturförderungspreis (2005), a fellowship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2007–2008), and the Authors’ Prize of the German-French Authors’ Days (2008 for Menschen in Kindergrößen). Steinbuch was a resident playwright at the Schauspielhaus Wien (2008/2009) and a participant in the playwrights’ studio at the Schauspiel Frankfurt (2014/2015). Her work has been supported, among other things, by the Austrian State Scholarship and the Hannsmann-Poethen Literary Scholarship from the City of Stuttgart (2016). In 2022, her radio play Wolfswelt was nominated for the ARD German Radio Play Award.
Gerhild Steinbuch is a co-initiator of DIE VIELEN in Austria and a founding member of the writers’ alliance HYDRA.
