Solothurn Literary Festival Alain Claude Sulzer is honored with the Solothurn Prize for Literature
The Basel author Alain Claude Sulzer will receive the Solothurn Literature Prize at the 47th Solothurn Literature Festival on Sunday (today). The recipient is delighted to be honored for his work - without having to suffer through shortlists, as is the case with the Swiss Book Prize.
01.06.2025, 08:00
SDA
Sulzer's work is not puffery, does not aim at the very broad public with appealing texts and zeitgeisty themes. The "hypersensitive virtuoso", as the "NZZ am Sonntag" once described him, has made a name for himself as a master of subtle human observation.
His work proves to be "immune to short-term trends", as the Solothurn Literature Prize jury explained in February. He soberly and carefully brings the repressed back to light and demonstrates his will to form and an incomparable feel for language and style in every work.
A dozen novels in 40 years
Sulzer does not contradict this description. "I've always stayed away from all trends," he says in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. "But when you've been in the business for so long and want to stay in it, there's really no other way." Sulzer is 72 years old and has been in the literary business for over 40 years.
To date, Sulzer's work comprises around a dozen novels and many shorter prose texts and essays. Growing up in a bilingual household in Riehen near Basel, he worked as a translator in his early days. His passion for good food led to literary excursions into gastronomy. His pronounced penchant for music made him a sought-after literary accompanist and presenter at music festivals and events.
Sulzer has already been awarded numerous prizes, albeit more abroad: the Prix Médicis étranger (2008) from France, the Hermann Hesse Prize (2009) from Germany and the Literature Prize of the Free German Authors' Association (2014). In Switzerland, he received the Individual Work Prize of the Swiss Schiller Foundation (2005) and the Culture Prize of the City of Basel (2013).
Rejection of competitions
He has so far been denied the Swiss Book Prize. He was nominated in 2014 and 2019 and came away empty-handed both times. "I didn't revel in the happiness of others, but was fully occupied with being annoyed that it wasn't mine," he wrote in the NZZ am Sonntag in 2022.
He is now all the more pleased about the Solothurn Literature Prize, for which he did not have to apply - unlike the Swiss Book Prize, for which publishers nominate their respective authors with their books. "I wasn't expecting the award in Solothurn, so I'm enjoying the national recognition I'm now receiving all the more," he says.
He recently had to fight out a dispute during the writing process of his latest novel "Fast wie ein Bruder" (2024). When processing an application for funding, the cultural representatives of the two Basel cities demanded a written explanation from the author as to why he used the word "gypsy" in the excerpt of his novel.
Sulzer refused and withdrew his application for funding. The international feature pages sided with the author and heaped criticism on the Basel literary sponsors. Sulzer himself no longer wishes to comment on this today.
Homosexuality and music
His international breakthrough came in 2006 with his acclaimed novel "A Perfect Waiter", which was translated into ten languages. Including Russian and Chinese. The author notes that this is unusual for a novel about homosexual love.
Several of his novels deal with homosexual relationships. This is based on his own homosexuality, he says. The then 30-year-old author revealed this as early as 1983 in his first novel "Das Erwachsenengerüst". Sulzer lives in Basel, in Vieux-Ferrette in Alsace and in Berlin - and has been in a committed relationship with his partner, the actor Georg Martin Bode, for 50 years.
Even though homosexuality is a common theme in some of his works, Sulzer says they are not gay novels. "My novels with homosexual protagonists were written no differently than the books about heterosexual people in relationships," he says.
There are other parallels to his biography in his works. In "Ein perfekter Kellner", "Postskriptum" (2015) and "Doppelleben" (2022), Sulzer skillfully straddles the line between historical fact and literary fiction. Music also plays an important role in several of his works as a basic framework or substructure. An opera libretto and his collaboration on two operetta libretti also arose from this penchant.
In his youth, he says, the desire to become a musician once buzzed around in his head. "But I was too lazy, so I became a writer - you don't have to practise, even if you rehearse all your life." Before that, however, he trained as a librarian at his parents' request.
Sulzer is well connected as an author in the literary scene. As editor of the recently published "literary symphony" on Joseph Haydn, he brought together a remarkable number of colleagues, including Daniel Kehlmann, the current Swiss Book Prize winner Zora del Buono, Elke Heidenreich and Franz Hohler.
*This text by Dominique Spirgi, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
