Austrian poet, author, and 1970 recipient of the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature. She is remembered for her lyric poetry and for a novella entitled Das Kind.
Her birth name was Christine Habernig, and she was born in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia.
She took her pseudonym, Lavant, from the name of the Austrian region -- the Lavant Valley -- where her father worked.
She was the ninth child of an Austrian miner.
Her mystically-themed writing was influenced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke.