Liesl Ujvary was born in Pressburg/Bratislava, Slovakia, 1939, moved to Austria in 1945, and spent her childhood in Lower Austria and Tirol. She studied Slavic languages, ancient Hebrew, and art history in Vienna, Zurich, and Moscow, writing her doctorate on Ilja Ehrenberg’s Julio Jurenito.
She taught Russian language and literature at Sophia University in Tokyo 1969-70. From 1971 Ujvary has lived as a freelance writer in Vienna, producing a wide but purist scope of poetry, prose, radio plays, articles and lectures, photography, electronic music, artificial intelligence, and computer art, and winning a number of prizes. Since her first publications, Freiheit ist Freiheit, an anthology of Russian underground poets which she edited and translated (Zurich: Arche 1975), and sicher & gut (1977/2017), she has supplied an evolving stream of work in developing contemporary media, notably including experimental electronic music / sound and video.
Liesl Ujvary is an important figure in the modernist tradition of concrete and abstract writing, and has been an important influence on younger generations. She shares a lack of due international recognition with a huge number of older female artists who don’t fit the “big monkey man” algorithm and are yet to be discovered. (2020)
A selection of her acoustic works for Austrian radio can be found at http://kunstradio.at/BIOS/ujvarybio.html