Alain Claude Sulzer wins top Swiss literary prize

Alain Claude Sulzer is a Swiss writer and translator from Basel. Keystone-SDA

The Swiss writer and translator Alain Claude Sulzer has been awarded the Solothurn Literary Days Prize 2025 for his lifetime's work. The writer, who lives between Basel, Berlin and Alsace, achieved international success in 2004 with his novel Ein perfekter Kellner [A perfect waiter].

 Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Born in 1953, Alain Claude Sulzer has created a body of work spanning four decades, including a dozen novels and shorter books.

Whether it’s a 19th-century story or post-war society, he always manages to create credible atmospheres and bring readers closer to protagonists who could easily go unnoticed “as secondary characters in the story”, the jury said in a statement on Monday.

Ein perfekter Kellner has been translated into many languages, including French, as have Annas Maske (2001) and Privatstunden (2007). Ein perfekter Kellner won the 2008 Prix Médicis étranger, a prestigious French literary award.

The Solothurn Literary Prize is given to authors and their works for “their literary quality, artistic individuality and the relevance of their content”, say the organisers.

The artist, his life and art are latent or manifest themes in Sulzer’s novels, as are violent realities ranging from sexual aggression to structural mechanisms of oppression. He brings to light, soberly and cautiously, what has been repressed, said the jury.

The winner of the Solothurn Literary Prize also receives CHF15,000 ($16,500); the prize will be officially awarded on June 1 during Solothurn Literary Days.

Translated from French by DeepL/sb

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].