ZURICH. The shortlist for this year's Swiss Literature Prize reads like a map of the country folded into eight books: a novel from the Zurich suburbs, a memoir in Vallader Romansh, a Ticinese family saga, two works from the Romandie and a debut written in the dialect-inflected German of the Emmental. Announced by the Federal Office of Culture in Bern, the list is the most linguistically balanced in the prize's history. It is also, booksellers say, the most readable.
The range is the story. The Romansh title, a collection of poems about the emptied villages of the high valleys, is the first in its language to reach the shortlist in years. Alongside it sit a Geneva novel of hospital night shifts, a Lugano saga spanning a century of emigration, and a work of reportage from Basel that has already sold out its first printing.
The prize, in its current form, is little more than a decade old, but it has settled quickly into the role of the country's literary weathervane. Its jury is required by statute to read across the language regions, a discipline almost no other national prize attempts, and its choices are watched as an annual verdict on the state of the four literatures. Pro Helvetia's translation grants then carry the winners across the internal borders.
The money matters, though less than the mechanics around it. Each award carries a five-figure cheque, welcome in a trade where a Swiss literary novel might sell three thousand copies. The larger effect is commercial: a shortlist place moves a title into the front windows of bookshops from St Gallen to Sion, and the translation funding that follows can treble a book's effective readership.
Behind the list stands a small ecosystem of stubborn institutions. The shortlisted titles come from independent houses in Zurich, Lausanne and Lugano, publishers who keep faith with poetry and the short story long after the conglomerates lost interest. The jury itself, critics and booksellers drawn from all four regions, reads for months in conditions of sworn secrecy, and the book trade treats its deliberations with a respect bordering on awe.
The reaction has been the usual pleasurable quarrel. Booksellers report the shortlist table cleared within days; critics have lit upon the omissions, as is their office and their pleasure. The most satisfying argument concerns the Romansh poems: whether their presence is a statement or simply a judgement of quality, and whether, in the end, the distinction matters.
The jury is unapologetic about its method. “We read across the language borders because the country writes across them,” says one member of the panel. The remark has been quoted back at the prize ever since, usually approvingly.
The four-language question is the prize's reason to exist. German-language Swiss literature has always had one foot in the larger German market, and the Romandie looks naturally towards Paris; the prize is one of the few occasions when all four literatures are made to sit at the same table and be judged together. The translation programme that follows the awards is, in effect, the country's literary foreign policy.
The calendar now fills in around the list. A readings tour takes the shortlisted authors to all four language regions through the winter, the translations are commissioned before the winners are even named, and the final ceremony in the spring will close the circle, after which the argument about next year's omissions can begin.
The wider meaning of the exercise is easy to miss and hard to overstate. Switzerland has few institutions in which its four cultures are obliged to take each other seriously as equals; the prize is one of them. A country that cannot read itself, the founders reasoned, will eventually have nothing to say to itself.
On a dark afternoon in December, the Romansh poet reads in a schoolhouse above the Albula line, to farmers, teachers and a class of teenagers. Outside, the red train threads the snow. Nobody present needs the poems translated, and everybody present understands that this, precisely, is the point.