[3] It was in Vienna - under military occupation till 1955 - that she grew up, acutely aware of her "outsider status" as a Protestant in a conservative city determined, during the 1950s, to recreate its catholic (pre-Nazi) past.

[2] After this experience Löffler decided to pursue a career in journalism, working between 1968 and 1972 as a foreign political editor with Die Presse, a liberal centrist daily newspaper based in Vienna.

[6] In 1988 Sigrid Löffler became a regular participant in "Das Literarische Quartett" ("The Literary Quartet"), a weekly television programme produced by West Germany's ZDF in collaboration (at that time) with Austria's ORF.

Löffler left the panel in June 2000, complaining because a fellow panelist, the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki had put forward Haruki Murakami's erotic novel South of the Border, West of the Sun for discussion.

Describing the book as "literary fast food", Löffler made it clear that she found it inappropriately trivial for inclusion in a series devoted to serious literature.