Peter Bichsel

Peter Bichsel (born March 24, 1935) is a popular Swiss-German writer and journalist representing modern German literature. He was a member of the Gruppe Olten.

Bichsel was born 1935 in Lucerne, Switzerland, the son of manual labourers. Shortly after he was born, the Bichsels moved to Olten, also in Switzerland. After finishing school, he became an elementary school teacher, a job which he held until 1968. From 1974 to 1981 he was the personal advisor of Willy Ritschard, a member of the Swiss Federal Council. Between 1972 and 1989 he made his mark as "writer in residence" and a guest lecturer at American universities. Bichsel has lived on the outskirts of Solothurn for several decades.

One of his first and most well known works is "And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman" (translated from the German by Michael Hamburger in 1968). Not as short as this first one, his children's stories were just as successful. For the most part, Bichsel's works for younger readers concern children's stubborn desire to take words literally and wreak havoc on the world of communicated ideas. In the early 1970s and 1980s, Bichsel's journalistic work pushed his literary work to a large extent into the background. Only "Der Busant" (1985) and "Warten in Baden-Baden" appeared again to have the Bichsel style that was so familiar to German readers. Peter Bichsel gave up being a professional teacher early in his lifetime, yet he has continued to teach his readers that the drudgery and banality of life is of our own making. Conversely, we have every opportunity to prevent our lives from being boring. This theme has helped make Peter Bichsel a symbol of German literary work today.

Awards

*1965 Prize of "Group 47"
*1970 Deutscher Jugendbuchpreis
*1981/82 Stadtschreiber von Bergen
*1996 Mainzer Stadtschreiber
*1999 Gottfried-Keller-Preis
*2004 Honorary Doctor of Theology, University of Basel