Max Frisch

Frisch trained and worked as an architect in Zurich, running his own practice and winning public commissions, before closing it down in his early forties once his writing income made the switch possible. His lifelong friendship and rivalry with fellow Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt shaped much of Switzerland's postwar literary culture.

I'm Not Stiller (1954) and Homo Faber (1957) both interrogate the same doubt (that reason and technical competence can ever fully explain or control a life), filtered through Frisch's own architect's precision. He kept extensive private journals throughout his career, later publishing selections read almost as essential to his fiction as the novels themselves; his long relationship with the poet Ingeborg Bachmann shadowed both writers' later work.

He died in Zurich in 1991.