AT AGE TWENTY-FIVE, Anna Mitgutsch earned her Ph.D. degree in English Literature at Salzburg University in her native Austria, with a dissertation on the British poet Ted Hughes. In the following years she published broadly on modern English and American poets and poetry and was headed for a productive career as a professor of literature. By virtue of her second major doctoral field, German literature, she was soon to hold university posts on three continents. From 1971 to 1973 she taught German literature at Hull University and the University of East Anglia in England. Returning to Austria in 1974, for the next four years she taught courses on women's literature, literary theory, and modern American poetry at Innsbruck University. In 1978 she traveled to South Korea, where she taught German language and literary theory. For the next five years, starting in 1980, she taught German language, literature, and culture at several American colleges and universities, including Amherst, Sarah Lawrence, and Tufts. Throughout this time, she authored journal articles and lectured at conferences in her twin fields of German and Anglo-American literature.

In 1985 Anna Mitgutsch published her debut novel, Die Züchtigung, and with it attained widespread critical acknowledgment. A year later, she settled in her hometown of Linz, determined henceforth to pursue her livelihood as a freelance writer and literary critic. By 1995 she had written another four novels, all of which appeared with major German publishing houses. Like her first, they were soon translated into several European languages, including English. Clearly, Anna Mitgutsch sees the novel as her literary calling, and in Oberlin she has begun writing what will be her sixth.

The authenticity and intensity of emotion that distinguished Die Züchtigung have typified Anna Mitgutsch's writing ever since. Inseparable from a plot that centers on fundamental human relationships — between mother and child, for example, or between two lovers — these qualities have consistently gained Anna Mitgutsch critical acclaim. At the same time, however, they have given rise to misunderstandings that blur the essential accomplishments of her writing. Too often, for example, both critics and readers have sought the source of the author's persuasiveness in her biography and have been quick to label her books as autobiographical writing.

For her part, Anna Mitgutsch has protested this confusion of fictional with memoiristic writing, which has accompanied the reception of her work from the very first.