Briefe an Georges

Veza Canetti

Venetiana "Veza" Taubner-Calderon Canetti was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Her works – including singular short stories published in the Viennese Arbeiter Zeitung and other socialist outlets – were only published under her own name posthumously. She preferred pseudonyms, as was common at the time for left-wing or satirical authors, her favourite being Veza Magd. The Tortoises which is set at the time of the Kristallnacht in 1938 remains her only known published novel. Her husband and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elias Canetti further posthumously declared her to be co-author of his Crowds and Power. She was also a translator of Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys, though the named translator is Richard Hoffmann who owned the agency where she freelanced, and three books by Upton Sinclair for the Malik Verlag (1930-32), where the named translator is once again male, this time her partner and future husband, Elias Canetti.