Elena Messner was born in 1983 in Klagenfurt/Celovec and grew up bilingually as a Carinthian Slovene there as well as in Ljubljana and Salzburg. She studied Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in Vienna and Aix-en-Provence. She has worked as a publisher, translator, literary critic, cultural scientist and editor. From 2013-2018, she taught German Studies in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. She has been teaching at the University of Klagenfurt since 2014. 2021-22 employed as a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. In 2014 she published the novel Das lange Echo, followed by the novels In die Transitzone (2016) and Nebelmaschine (2020). She has published numerous academic articles, four of her plays have been performed to date, and she has also edited three academic anthologies and six literary anthologies. In 2021, she was awarded the Carinthian Promotion Prize for Literature. In 2022, she received a working grant for literature from the City of Vienna.