Peter Stamm: On Very Thin Ice

From Lake Constance to Bottrop: New Stories by Peter Stamm

Peter Stamm tells his new stories from the lives of his characters with his usual accessibility and subtlety. They seek a fresh start, must endure compromises, and confront the crises of the present: After an accident in his homeland, a Swiss ski instructor teaches in a West German ski hall. An actress loses herself in her characters. And snow and ice cover an abandoned city. In "On Very Thin Ice," Peter Stamm demonstrates how artfully and multilayered stories can be told in just a few pages, and how a single narrative can occupy one longer than a comprehensive novel.

Peter Stamm, born in 1963 in Switzerland, studied English, psychology, and psychopathology for several semesters and worked in various professions, including in Paris and New York. Since 1990, he has worked as a freelance author, writing prose, plays, and radio dramas. Since his debut novel "Agnes" (1998), six more novels, five collections of stories, and a volume of plays have been published, most recently the novels "The Archive of Feelings" and "In a Dark Blue Hour." Under the title "The Expulsion from Paradise," his Bamberg Poetics Lectures were published in 2014, followed by the Zurich Poetics Lectures "A Fantasy of Time" in 2024.

Peter Stamm has received numerous awards for his work, including the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2014, the ZKB Schiller Prize in 2017, and the Solothurn Literature Prize in 2018. His novel "The Gentle Indifference of the World" was honored with the Swiss Book Prize in 2018.

The event is supported by: Pro Helvetia, Swiss Cultural Foundation.