Austrian Nobel literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek said Friday she longed to have her quiet life back and had recorded a speech to be screened at the award ceremony in Stockholm as her fear of crowds kept her at home.
"I have recorded my speech here in Vienna last week. It was done by Swedish television and will be projected," Jelinek, 58, told AFP.
"I did this because I cannot go to Sweden because of my 'social phobia', I cannot stand crowds," she said of the December 10 ceremony. A month after winning the honour, the reclusive writer said the prize still brought her mostly doubt and insecurity.
"The joy will come later. Things like this prize tear me into the public and I cannot stand being under the spotlight.
"I hope this will end someday and I can have my life back. I want my life back," she said with a laugh.
Renowned and often reviled at home for denouncing Austria's Nazi past, its present-day politics and women's subjugation by society, Jelinek indicated she had no intention of changing tack.
"I am thinking about writing another gothic novel like 'Children of the Dead'. It is my most important work," she said of the 1995 book that portrays Austria as being built on the graves of forgotten victims of fascism.
The author said the Nobel prize money of 1.1 million euros (1.3 million dollars) had eased the financial pressure to write but she felt the response to the award has been "very negative", citing an article in the German weekly Der Spiegel.
"They said I do not deserve it, because I am a local writer. Maybe they are right." Austrian writers like herself and Thomas Bernard perhaps suffered this status because "we wrapped ourselves" into dealing with national demons.
"Austria is built on the lie that it was the first country to fall to Hitler. We were the first who exported Hitler as a finished persona. It is always the writers who point this out."
Jelinek withdrew from public life in 1996 after the populist Freedom Party of Joerg Haider denounced her writing as low and immoral art, an opinion echoed by the Vatican last month when it criticised the Nobel academy's choice.
She described US President George W. Bush re-election as a tragedy and part of the surge of the political right which she said began in her home country in the late 1990s.
"It is a tragedy. It signals the separation of the world. They will deny the other side the right to speak," she said.
"The extreme right-wing is on the go. We in Austria are always backward and behind, it began here." Jelinek's publisher, Germany's Rowohlt, said 220,000 copies of her novels had been sold in the German original alone since the Nobel prize was announced on October 7.
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