We congratulate our author Peter Rüedi on the occasion of his 75th birthday on January 15, 2018. He wrote the biography Dürrenmatt or The Idea of the Whole.

Peter Rüedi is ideally placed as a biographer because of his expertise: He had been working with and about Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who was his first employer at Zürich’s Sonntags-Journal; regular and intense talks for the culture pages of the newspaper Weltwoche followed. As head dramaturg at Zürich’s Schauspielhaus, the most important theatre in town, he was co-responsible for staging Dürrenmatt’s last play Achterloo.

In contrast to authors who turn themselves and their lives into topics in their books, we don’t know Friedrich Dürrenmatt as a person if we know his works. While writing, Dürrenmatt even filtered everything intimate from his autobiographic works called Materials. In a gripping and elegant way, Peter Rüedi tells of the life of the world author, of the history of his writing, from the beginnings until the breakthrough 1956/58 with the comedy The Visit and the detective novel The Pledge – the decisive years that formed Dürrenmatt as an author: A person who was at the end of his art again and again and yet re-invented himself over and over.

We are happy to announce that the Chinese translation of Peter Rüedi’s biography will be published by Zhejiang University Press this year. The original of Dürrenmatt or The Idea of the Whole was published in January 2011, in time for Dürrenmatt’s 90th birthday. Yes, you’ve seen that right, Dürrenmatt would turn 100 in 2021 – that’s only three years away.