SWISS LITERATURE SERIES

In 2008, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, began working with Dalkey Archive Press to identify some of the greatest and most innovative authors in twentieth and twenty-first century Swiss letters, in the tradition of such world renowned writers as Max Frisch, Robert Walser, and Robert Pinget. Dalkey Archive editors met with critics and scholars in Zürich, Geneva, Basel, and Bern, and went on to prepare reports on numerous important Swiss authors whose work was deemed underrepresented in English. Developing from this ongoing collaboration, the Swiss Literature Series, launched in 2011 with Gerhard Meier’s Isle of the Dead and Aglaja Veteranyi’s Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, has been working to remedy this dearth of Swiss writing in the Anglophone world with a bold initiative to publish four titles a year, each supplemented with marketing efforts far exceeding what publishers can normally provide for works in translation.

With writing originating from German, French, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic, the Swiss Literature Series will stand as a testimony to Switzerland’s contribution to world literature.