Pick a country to see its literary prizes and which of their books you can read in English.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2025 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Dutchwomen”
Dorothee Elmiger
Novel · 156 pages
AI-generated summary:A nameless writer pulls over to take a call from a celebrated theatre director, who wants her for his new project, the reconstruction of a case set in the tropics. Weeks later she joins his troupe on a trek deep into the jungle.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2025 winner
Schweizer Buchpreis 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Enchanted Predestination”
Jonas Lüscher
Novel · 347 pages · Historical, Speculative, War
AI-generated summary:An Algerian soldier caught in the first German poison gas attack stands up and walks away. In a future Cairo, a stand-up comedian watches an android laugh at her jokes. A Bohemian weaver attacks the loom that replaced him.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Grandmothers”
Melara Mvogdobo
Novel · 127 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two grandmothers, one from a poor Swiss farming family, the other from a fairly wealthy family in Cameroon, both born around 1940. As young women they have dreams; they marry and come up against the narrow limits patriarchy sets them.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We Were Never in the Sea”
Meral Kureyshi
Novel · 213 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Lili moves into a care home to support her husband, and her family needs someone to visit her. I am that someone, says the narrator, who lives in the same house as Lili's granddaughter Sophie, raising Sophie's son with her.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2025 · Shortlist
Lázár
Nelio Biedermann
Novel · 304 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:When Lajos von Lázár, a blond child with water-blue eyes, is born in the forest castle of a noble family in southern Hungary, the twentieth century begins, and with it the end of his family's old way of life.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Because of Him”
Zora del Buono
Novel · 200 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:The narrator was eight months old when her father was killed in a car accident in 1963. Now sixty, she sets out to find E.T., the 28-year-old who caused the accident, and asks how he has lived with that guilt.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2024 · Shortlist
Béla Rothenbühler
Novel · 213 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:In a small Swiss town, Sabine and Chantal found an arts association. They build up a university theatre group, and their great strength is writing grant applications that bring in as much money as possible.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Shift in the Rock”
Mariann Bühler
Novel · 202 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Three people in a village who know nothing of each other: Elisabeth, who takes over the bakery after her husband's death, Alois, who runs the family farm and struggles with loneliness, and a young woman who comes back.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tobacco and Chocolate”
Martin R. Dean
Novel · 220 pages · Autofiction, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:After his mother's death, the narrator finds an album of photos from his early childhood in Trinidad and Tobago. As a young woman from a family of cigar workers in Aargau, she had a child by a man of the West Indian upper class.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2024 · Shortlist
Favorita
Michelle Steinbeck
Novel · 448 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:Fila grows up with her grandmother; her mother has disappeared. When news arrives from Naples of her mother's death, the cause is unclear, cirrhosis or murder, and Fila sets off across a neo-fascist Italy.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2023 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Lifting Fog”
Christian Haller
Novella · 122 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Copenhagen, 1925. A man appears in the light of a street lamp, vanishes into darkness and reappears under the next. The observer, Werner Heisenberg, begins to think towards quantum mechanics; the man, grieving his wife, knows nothing of it.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2023 · Shortlist
Adam Schwarz
Novel · 292 pages · Satire, Speculative, Nature
AI-generated summary:Léon and his girlfriend Kathrin board a cruise ship to sail the now ice-free Northeast Passage to Tokyo. Soon after departure Kathrin disappears, and Léon is not on the passenger list: as if he no longer exists.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2023 · Shortlist
Demian Lienhard
Novel · 312 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Berlin, spring 1940. On Goebbels's orders, a big band is founded for the propaganda station Germany Calling. A Swiss writer is hired to write a novel about the band, and finds himself in Berlin's shady jazz cellars.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Grey Peter”
Matthias Zschokke
Novel · 168 pages
AI-generated summary:Despite several blows of fate, Peter goes on living as before: he lacks the feeling chromosome. When a desperate mother on a train asks him to take her son Zéphyr to Basel, a bumpy but tender bond begins.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Picture Without a Girl”
Sarah Elena Müller
Novel · 200 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A girl who hardly speaks and wets the bed is allowed to watch as much television as she likes at the flat of Ege, a neighbour obsessed with media, while her parents are busy with other things. In his films she plays a part.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2022 · Winner
Blutbuch
Kim de l'Horizon
Novel · 336 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A narrator who identifies as neither man nor woman has escaped a shabby Swiss suburb for Zurich. When the grandmother falls ill with dementia, the narrator begins to confront the past.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2022 winner
Schweizer Buchpreis 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“French Fries from Hell”
Lioba Happel
Novel · 164 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:From prison, Fritz writes 23 letters about his childhood: to the father he saw only once, about the special school, the social worker and his rescue by Rimbaud, and above all about his mother, who ate constantly, tied him to a table leg and beat him.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2022 · Shortlist
Simon Froehling
Novel · 266 pages
AI-generated summary:Told in the second person, the life of a gay man in Athens, Cairo, Berlin and Zurich, finding his way between the dating and art scenes, and again and again confronting the depths of his bipolar illness.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Red Diamond”
Thomas Hürlimann
Novel · 316 pages · Coming of age, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the autumn of 1963, eleven-year-old Arthur Goldau is dropped off at a monastery boarding school high in the Swiss mountains. The monastery is said to hide a priceless diamond from the Habsburg crown.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Counting Stones”
Thomas Röthlisberger
Novel · 175 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:In southern Finland, Matti is left alone in his farmhouse with a dog, a rifle and a bottle of schnapps after his wife Märta leaves him after forty years. Their son Olli has never found his place and is always short of money.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2021 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Invention of Disobedience”
Martina Clavadetscher
Novel · 276 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:Three women in three worlds: Iris, pacing her penthouse in Manhattan, Ling, who checks sex dolls for flaws in a factory in southern China, and Ada Lovelace in old Europe, dreaming of new kinds of machines.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tierra del Fuego”
Michael Hugentobler
Novel · 222 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Thomas Bridges, foster son of an English missionary, grows up among Yamana children in Tierra del Fuego in the mid-nineteenth century and obsessively compiles a dictionary of their language, which decades later a German ethnologist tries to save.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“What Is the Case”
Thomas Duarte
Novel · 299 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:After midnight, a clerk at a foundation turns up at a police station and tells how his life came apart: he is suspected of financial irregularities, and he has let a woman who works illegally live in his office.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bigger Than You”
Veronika Sutter
Short stories · 191 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Fifteen loosely linked stories, set between the Swiss women's strikes of 1991 and 2019, about people like Gloria, Helen and Gino who keep secret what happens behind their doors: the moment love turns into violence.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2020 · Winner
das alles hier, jetzt
Anna Stern
Novel · 240 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Ananke dies young after a short illness and leaves an unbearable gap in a group of friends. Paralysed in the weeks after her death, they summon up memories of their shared childhood and youth.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Half-Beard”
Charles Lewinsky
Novel · 676 pages · Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In 1313, in the valley of Schwyz, young Sebi is no good for farm work or soldiering and would rather invent stories. From Halbbart, a stranger from far away with only half a face, he learns what makes people good and bad.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2020 · Shortlist
Aus der Zuckerfabrik
Dorothee Elmiger
Novel · 270 pages
AI-generated summary:A worker's T-shirt reads 'My skills never end'; Switzerland's first lottery millionaire looks out to sea on a Caribbean beach. A writer follows the traces of money and desire through the centuries and around the world.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2020 shortlist
Schweizer Buchpreis 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Hero”
Karl Rühmann
Novel · 258 pages · War, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 2005, two officers who fought on opposite sides of the Yugoslav wars are charged as war criminals at the International Tribunal in The Hague. In detention, they become friends.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Of Bad Parents”
Tom Kummer
Novel · 244 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A man returns to Switzerland with one of his sons, having lost his wife and left his other child in Los Angeles. At night he works as a chauffeur, driving diplomats and pharma executives through the country.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2019 · Winner
GRM. Brainfuck
Sibylle Berg
Novel · 448 pages · Speculative, Politics, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Rochdale, England, in a near future: Brexit is done, the monarchy abolished, the state relies on total surveillance. Four children who know nothing but a failed state flee into grime music and start their own revolution.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Untenable Conditions”
Alain Claude Sulzer
Novel · 266 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:1968. For decades the window displays of Stettler, decorator at the Quatre Saisons department store, have been legendary. Now, nearly sixty, he is suddenly given a young colleague, and his world begins to crumble.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The One Who Comes After”
Ivna Žic
Novel · 164 pages · Family, Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Midsummer. A young woman takes the train from Paris to Croatia, where her family waits on her grandmother's island as every summer. Her dead grandfather sits down beside her, and she thinks of a married man she cannot let go.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Jump”
Simone Lappert
Novel · 330 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A young woman in gardening clothes stands on the roof of a building, throwing down roof tiles, and refuses to come down. Police seal off the building, onlookers film, and ten people connected with her lose their footing.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Brat”
Tabea Steiner
Novel · 236 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Antonia and Chris move to a village and have a child. But the couple are overwhelmed, their relationship falls apart, and little Timon, left with Antonia, becomes a problem child.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2018 · Winner
Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt
Peter Stamm
Novel · 144 pages · Love, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In Stockholm, Christoph, an ageing writer, arranges to meet the much younger Lena. He tells her that twenty years ago he loved a woman who looked just like her, and that he knows the life she leads and what lies ahead of her.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Here Everything Is Still Possible”
Gianna Molinari
Novel · 192 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:A young woman is hired as a night watchwoman at a packaging factory that is about to close. A wolf is said to have got onto the site. Night after night she makes her rounds and checks the fences.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Overcoming Gravity”
Heinz Helle
Novel · 208 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Two brothers go from bar to bar for a night. The elder has long been drinking against the misery of the world, of wars and violence, but he also tells his brother that he is about to become a father.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2018 · Shortlist
Die Hochhausspringerin
Julia von Lucadou
Novel · 288 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Riva is a high-rise jumper, a perfectly functioning athlete with millions of fans in a world of ubiquitous cameras. When she suddenly refuses to train, a young psychologist, Hitomi, is assigned to watch her and make her compliant again.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Lizard Child”
Vincenzo Todisco
Novel · 214 pages · Migration, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Officially the child must not exist. In the host country, while his father works on building sites and his mother in a factory, the son of Italian seasonal workers in 1960s Switzerland has to hide under the sideboard and in the wardrobe.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2017 · Winner
Kraft
Jonas Lüscher
Novel · 224 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Richard Kraft, a rhetoric professor in Tübingen, unhappily married and short of money, is invited to Silicon Valley to compete for a million dollars: in an 18-minute talk he must explain why all that is, is good, and can still be improved.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Everything Is Always Beautiful”
Julia Weber
Novel · 212 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Fourteen-year-old Anais and her younger brother Bruno live with their mother, who says life is tremendous and would like another glass of wine. The children try to shield themselves and her from the outside world.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Shorter Life of Klaus Halm”
Lukas Holliger
Novel · 300 pages
AI-generated summary:An unemployed film projectionist in Basel rarely leaves his flat. One day on the tram he notices a man and starts following him: Klaus Halm, who seems to have everything the narrator lacks, a wife, a child, work and success.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bone Songs”
Martina Clavadetscher
Novel · 301 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:The Blue, White, Red and Green families live in a closed-off settlement with strict rules, in which reproduction and nature come first. When Regina and Jakob Green cannot have a child, they secretly help nature along.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Request Stop”
Urs Faes
Nonfiction · 198 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Seventeen stops, twenty-seven minutes by tram: on his daily ride across Zurich to radiation therapy, a writer tries to put into words what is happening to him, his fatigue, his fear and his memories of childhood.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2016 · Winner
Die Toten
Christian Kracht
Novel · 208 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Berlin in the early 1930s. A Swiss film director tries to persuade the UFA tycoon Alfred Hugenberg to finance a horror film, to be shot in Japan, where Masahiko Amakasu is plotting against Hollywood.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2016 · Shortlist
Charles Lewinsky
Novel · 396 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:I am Andersen. A man wakes up as a foetus in the womb with all the knowledge and memories of a past life. His parents sometimes think they see an old man's knowing look in their strange baby's face.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Seeing Everything”
Christoph Höhtker
Novel · 336 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A day and a night in B., a provincial town in western Germany: Michael Brandt waits for a date, a designer talks to his bicycles, and someone running a starred restaurant in B. must be mad.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2016 · Shortlist
Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch
Michelle Steinbeck
Novel · 128 pages · Speculative, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Loribeth is on the run with a suitcase, and in it a dead child. A fortune teller tells her that to grow up she must take the suitcase to her missing father, and she sets out across cities, deserts and seas.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2016 · Shortlist
Und was hat das mit mir zu tun?
Sacha Batthyany
Nonfiction · 224 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Weeks before the end of the Second World War, the writer's great-aunt held a party at her castle in Rechnitz, Austria, during which 180 Jews were shot. He sets out to learn what this family history has to do with him.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2015 · Winner
Eins im Andern
Monique Schwitter
Novel · 224 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Instead of writing, a woman googles her first love one evening and learns that he jumped to his death almost five years earlier. Shocked that she never missed him, she starts to look back on her life through twelve men.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2015 shortlist
Schweizer Buchpreis 2015 · Shortlist
Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit
Dana Grigorcea
Novel · 228 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Victoria has only just returned to her home city of Bucharest when she is caught up in a bank robbery. Given leave to recover, she explores the city of her childhood under Ceaușescu and of today.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bowing Before Mirrors”
Martin R. Dean
Nonfiction · 101 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:In essays, a writer, the son of a Swiss mother and a father from Trinidad, asks how much meeting the foreign, on journeys and in literature, has made him who he is, and fears that globalisation is erasing it.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2015 · Shortlist
Elefanten im Garten
Meral Kureyshi
Novel · 140 pages · Migration, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:When her father dies unexpectedly, a young woman in Switzerland loses her bearings. For a year she drifts, attends lectures at random and travels to Prizren, the city her family fled when she was ten.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“How We Grow Older”
Ruth Schweikert
Novel · 270 pages · Family, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Every morning Jacques, 87, cooks lunch for his wife Friederike, who needs care. For nine years he lived with another woman, then returned to his marriage. Two families, three generations, from the Second World War to today.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 · Winner
Lukas Bärfuss
Novel · 182 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two brothers hardly knew each other. When one kills himself, the other sets out to learn about his life, and about the nickname his friends in the Scouts gave him: Koala.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 · Shortlist
Schlafgänger
Dorothee Elmiger
Novel · 204 pages · Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:Somewhere deep in a European forest they meet: border commuters, smugglers, refugees, workers, asylum seekers, inspectors, artists, translators, ghosts. A chorus of voices talks about origins, borders and justice.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Panicked Spring”
Gertrud Leutenegger
Novel · 217 pages
AI-generated summary:While an Icelandic volcano grounds European air traffic, the narrator meets Jonathan, a young man with a birthmark selling a street newspaper on London Bridge. The two feel strangely familiar, until Jonathan suddenly disappears.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2014 shortlist
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Among Us”
Guy Krneta
Novel · 159 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Snapshots from the life of a Swiss family across fifty years, like pictures in a photo album, told in Bernese dialect. Among ourselves, the grandfather says, when he still believes he can hold the family together.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 · Shortlist
Der beruhigende Klang von explodierendem Kerosin
Heinz Helle
Novel · 151 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A German philosophy student in New York is preparing a lecture on consciousness. His girlfriend follows him there to save their love. A novel about coffee in the early morning, philosophy and football.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2013 · Winner
Jens Steiner
Novel · 220 pages
AI-generated summary:In a village, three teenagers plan a summer holiday knowing that nothing will happen, two brothers have not spoken for years since a dispute over an inheritance, and a trio meets regularly to play carrom.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2013 · Shortlist
Henriette Vásárhelyi
Novel · 190 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Eva's lover Jan has died. She shuts herself away in the flat that recalls their old shared household of three, and meets Monn because he has been given Jan's old mobile number.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2013 · Shortlist
Frühling der Barbaren
Jonas Lüscher
Novella · 132 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:On a business trip, the Swiss factory heir Preising stays at an upmarket oasis resort in Tunisia, where young British financiers are celebrating a lavish wedding. Then the pound collapses and Britain goes bankrupt.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2013 · Shortlist
Soutines letzte Fahrt
Ralph Dutli
Novel · 268 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:On 6 August 1943, the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, hidden in a hearse, is driven from Chinon on the Loire to occupied Paris for an urgent operation. In a morphine delirium, he relives his life on the 24-hour journey.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Decline”
Roman Graf
Novel · 204 pages · Love, Nature
AI-generated summary:A young couple set out on a climbing tour in the Swiss Alps. André wants to show Louise, from Berlin, the beauty of this world, but fog and rain make the ascent hard, and the closer they get to the summit, the further apart they drift.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2012 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Calf in Front of the Gotthard Post”
Peter von Matt
Nonfiction · 367 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Essays on Switzerland, a country between idyll and globalisation, Alpine tradition and high-tech tunnels: on its literature and politics, its careless use of language and its closing of borders to immigrants.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2012 · Shortlist
Aus den Fugen
Alain Claude Sulzer
Novel · 230 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In the middle of a concert, the star pianist Marek Olsberg breaks off, closes the piano lid with the words That's it, and leaves the hall. His act changes more lives than his own.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Many Thanks for Life”
Sibylle Berg
Novel · 400 pages · Satire, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Toto, an orphan of no clear sex, too fat and too tall, is born in the cold summer of 1966 in East Germany. Abandoned by both parents, Toto drifts through a broken world as if goodness, innocence and love still existed.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wolkenbruch's Wondrous Journey into the Arms of a Shiksa”
Thomas Meyer
Novel · 276 pages · Love, Coming of age, Satire
AI-generated summary:Motti Wolkenbruch, a young Orthodox Jew in Zurich, has a problem: the women his mother lines up for him to marry all look like her. Not so Laura, his fellow student, but she is a shiksa.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beside Oneself”
Ursula Fricker
Novel · 255 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Summer in Berlin. On their way to visit friends in Mecklenburg, the architect Sebastian has a stroke. Doctors keep him alive, but it soon becomes clear that he will remain severely brain-damaged.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2011 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Jacob Decides to Love”
Catalin Dorian Florescu
Novel · 402 pages · Historical, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Jacob Obertin grows up in Triebswetter, a Swabian village in the Romanian Banat, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. His story widens into an epic of his family across 300 years, beginning in Lorraine.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2011 · Shortlist
Charles Lewinsky
Novel · 539 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Kurt Gerron was once a star of Berlin cinema and is now one prisoner among thousands in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Ordered to make a film depicting the Jews' life there as paradise, he faces a choice on which his life depends.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Alias, or Real Life”
Felix Philipp Ingold
Novel · 290 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:What should one do with what a dead friend leaves behind? A narrator pieces together the life of Kirill Bergerow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga German whose life spans half of Europe and half a century.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2011 · Shortlist
Grünschnabel
Monica Cantieni
Novel · 232 pages · Coming of age, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:My father bought me from the city for 365 francs: an orphan girl adopted into an immigrant neighbourhood of the 1970s collects words in matchboxes to find her way in her new family and its language.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2011 · Shortlist
Peter Stamm
Short stories · 189 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Stories of lives postponed, remembered and missed: Alexander, who should be happy with beautiful, successful Sonja and has a lover, an abandoned hotel in the mountains, a priest who feeds the birds, a first love.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2010 · Winner
Tauben fliegen auf
Melinda Nadj Abonji
Novel · 212 pages · Migration, Family, War
AI-generated summary:The Kocsis family lives in Switzerland but does not feel at home there. They belong to the Hungarian minority in northern Serbia and emigrated years ago, first the father, then the mother with the two daughters, Nomi and Ildiko.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2010 winner
Schweizer Buchpreis 2010 · Shortlist
Einladung an die Waghalsigen
Dorothee Elmiger
Novel · 152 pages · Coming of age, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Decades ago a fire broke out in the tunnels of a coalfield, and it still burns underground. Margarete and Fritzi, the last young people of a vanishing town, set out on an expedition to explore their own origins.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Notes and Details 1964–2007”
Kurt Marti
Nonfiction · 1422 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Columns written for a Protestant magazine over more than four decades: pointed notes, portraits, aphorisms and polemics on literature, theology and the church, and on politics and society.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I'm the Goalie”
Pedro Lenz
Novel · 183 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:The Goalie, an addict from a village in the Swiss Mittelland, looks back on his world in the 1980s. Out of prison, he tries to find his feet again, finds odd jobs and falls in love with a waitress.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Pair Formation”
Urs Faes
Novel · 191 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Andreas Lüscher, a psychologist who prefers to keep his distance, works as a counsellor on a hospital cancer ward. One day he comes across the file of a patient he loved intensely years ago.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2009 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“More Sea”
Ilma Rakusa
Nonfiction · 321 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In short chapters, a writer traces her path from a curious little girl, daughter of a Slovene father and a Hungarian mother, through a Central Europe redrawn after the Second World War, to Zurich and beyond.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Airport Fish”
Angelika Overath
Novel · 172 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In the placelessness of an airport, three lives cross. A tired magazine photographer, dizzy with travel images in front of the reef aquarium in the transit hall, grows close to the man who looks after its fish.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Patterns of Hans”
Eleonore Frey
Novel · 114 pages
AI-generated summary:Hans is different from the others: massive, bearded and silent, he is always in the way, one of those whom society shuts out, many fear and more insult. A report on a man who will not fit into the busy world.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dispatches to Milan”
Jürg Laederach
Nonfiction · 187 pages
AI-generated summary:In 2002, Swiss radio invites two writers to talk about jazz. The meeting starts an exchange of emails, first about music, then a running record of everyday life, collected here from one side of the correspondence.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2009 · Shortlist
Herr Adamson
Urs Widmer
Novel · 176 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:On 22 May 2032, the day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man sits in the lush garden of his childhood with a recorder and tells his granddaughter the story of Mr Adamson, whom he first met as a boy.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2008 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Swimming Home”
Rolf Lappert
Novel · 543 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Wilbur's mother dies giving birth to him, his father disappears, and his first home is an incubator. Only when his grandparents take him in does he learn what home means, but the happiness does not last.
Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2008 shortlist
Schweizer Buchpreis 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Children's Wedding”
Adolf Muschg
Novel · 580 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Klaus Marbach, who worked on the official report on Switzerland's role in the Second World War, continues his research alone in a German town at the heart of an aluminium empire, protected by the dynasty's last heir.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“When the Moon Fell from the Sky”
Anja Jardine
Short stories · 301 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Stories of loss and fleeting encounters: two strangers who share a commuter train every morning without ever speaking, a woman who receives two letters from an unknown man, an old man watching young love in an apple orchard.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2008 · Shortlist
Hundert Tage
Lukas Bärfuss
Novel · 180 pages · War, Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Kigali, April 1994. David, a Swiss aid worker, lets the last evacuation flight for foreigners leave without him and hides in his house for a hundred days, fed by his gardener, because of Agathe, the woman he loves.
Schweizer Buchpreis 2008 · Shortlist
Wir fliegen
Peter Stamm
Short stories · 370 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories of moments when something in a life shifts: Heidi, who once wanted to be an artist and now has a husband and child she never wanted, and Bruno, a hotel porter waiting overnight for a frightening test result.
