Seven Years by Peter Stamm is available from Granta Books.
Photograph © Bergfahrt Festival
Peter Stamm on imagining his characters as buildings, why he wants to have a room full of ugly objects and whether he believes that people can change.
Seven Years by Peter Stamm is available from Granta Books.
Photograph © Bergfahrt Festival
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Peter Stamm was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novels Agnes, On A Day Like This, Unformed Landscape and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories, as well as numerous short stories and radio plays. His latest novel Seven Years is published by Granta Books. He lives outside of Zurich.
More about the author →Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.
More about the author →In this special Edinburgh Book Festival edition of the Granta Podcast Laura Barber talks to Kapka Kassabova (Street Without a Name, Twelve Minutes of Love) and Peter Stamm (Seven Years) about the often paradoxical relationship between writing and place.
Peter Stamm on the Swiss referendum to join the EU. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.
Peter Stamm on the oldest barber in Switzerland, and Michael Hofmann on translating Peter Stamm.
Peter Stamm on the drive of freedom in literature, German Romanticism and narrational technique.
‘It has nothing to do with the question of the foreigners. No one in Eisenhuttenstadt wants the foreigners here.’
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