Maja Haderlap (born 8 March 1961 in Eisenkappel-Vellach (Slovene: Železna Kapla-Bela, Carinthia)) is a bilingual Slovenian-German Austrian writer, best known for her multiple-award-winning novel, Angel of Oblivion, about the Slovene ethnic minority's transgenerational trauma of being treated as 'homeland traitors' by the German-speaking Austrian neighbors, because they were the only ever-existing military resistance against National Socialism in Austria.

After reading her grandmother’s diary, she was “afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed by its weight.” She made a conscious decision to write about her family’s history in a novel.

She was editor for many years of the Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine 'Mladje' and wrote poetry, prose, and essays in both Slovenian and German.

Winning one of the most important awards for literature in the German language, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2011,[citation needed] and the Max Frisch Prize of the City of Zurich in 2018,[citation needed] her most notable novel was made into a drama and put on theater stages.

The story is told from a point of view of a young girl, growing up in the late-1960s or early-1970s in the Austrian province of Carinthia, learning to navigate the terrain between Slovenian, a language of the past anti-Nazi resistance and present humiliation, and German, an escape from being treated as traitor by her German-speaking Austrian neighbors.