The author living in Carinthia and Vienna Erwin Riesswho was just as well known for his detective stories about the wheelchair-bound detective Groll as for his commitment to disability rights and inclusion, died at the age of 66, as became known from his immediate surroundings.
Most recently he published “Mr. Groll and the Wolves of Salzburg”, the ninth part of his Groll crime series, Mr. Groll and his assistant, but the lecturer also investigated in Carinthia (“Mr. Groll in the shadow of the Karawanken”, 2012). In 2016, the Klagenfurt Ensemble performed the “Loibl Saga” in the theater, a play about the Loibl concentration camp.
Riess was born in Vienna in 1957, grew up in Krems and studied politics and theater in Vienna, Berlin and Rostock. He wrote essays, short stories, radio plays and screenplays. His plays include “Kuruzzen”, “Loibl-Saga”, “The Wrath of Eleonore Batthyány” and “Mr. Grillparzer plucks up courage and takes a Danube steamer to the Black Sea”. His eight Groll novels (most recently “Herr Groll und die Wölfe von Salzburg” were published in 2021) were often a mixture of travel and crime literature and always characterized by an enlightening impetus.
After a spinal cord tumor, he became a wheelchair user and subsequently an activist in the autonomous disability movement. “Not only was he highly proactive as an author and spokesman for the disabled, there was also no professional or socio-political initiative that did not find his support,” said the IG authors today. Lived in previous years Riesswhich was awarded the Lower Austria Prize for Literature in 2002, in Vienna-Floridsdorf and in Carinthia.