Christiane Singer
Christiane Singer, married name Christiane Thurn-Valsassina (23 March 1943, in Marseille – 4 April 2007, in Vienna) was a French-Austrian writer, essayist and novelist. Biography. Her father was of Hungarian origin and her mother was half Russian and half Czech. Because of the persecution of the Jews, her parents fled Hungary, then Austria, and settled in Paris, France, in 1935. She was born eight years later, in 1943, in Marseille. She attended high school and the Conservatory of Theatre and Dramatic Arts in Marseille and then went on to study literature at the University of Aix-en -Provence, where she obtained a Doctorate of Modern Literature. In 1968, she met Count Georg von Thurn-Valsassina, an architect, who would become her husband, and settled in 1973 in his medieval castle of Rastenberg (Austria), not far from Vienna. There she raised their two sons. This castle inspired the poetical essay of the same name in 1996, "Rastenberg". She also organized personal development seminars in her home, which she designed, and which her architect husband built. In the late 1970s she founded the Dianus-Trikont-Verlag in Munich together with the editor . She followed the teachings of Karlfried Graf  Dürckheim (a disciple of C.G. Jung). In Switzerland, she was a lecturer at the University of Basel, then a lecturer at the University of Friburg. Her work and her personal reflection were entirely centered on the necessary taking into account of the spiritual which lives in everyone's heart. She was a relatively prolific writer, of Christian sensitivity imbued with Oriental wisdom, who refrained from giving lessons in morals and excludeed all dogmatism. She won several literary prizes, including the Prix des libraires for "La Mort viennoise" in 1979, le Prix Albert Camus for "Histoire d'âme" in 1989, and le  prix de la langue française en 2006 for the whole of her work. She once said in a radio-interview: In September 2006, when doctors announced that she had six months left to live as a result of cancer, she wrote a diary in her last months, which was published under the title "Derniers fragments d'un long voyage".