Peter Stamm, born in 1963, lives in Winterthur and is one of the greatest writers of his generation. Like few other authors, he finds precise and evocative images for the infinite possibilities and impossibilities of romantic relationships, of coldness and attraction, of distance and closeness. Stamm's trademark is his artfully concise and unadorned style. Style is just a dress, Stamm once said, but literature must show skin. Marianne

Grosse, Mainz's head of cultural affairs, sees Stamm as an excellent choice for the position of city writer: "In Peter Stamm's prose works, radio plays, and theater pieces, I am particularly impressed by his simple, thoroughly detached narrative style. His focus on short main clauses and his almost complete renunciation of overly decorative embellishments characterize him as an extraordinary writer and make him an important literary figure of our time. I am delighted to welcome Peter Stamm as Mainz's new city writer and am extremely excited to see what accents he will set during his term of office."

With his debut novel "Agnes," a complicated love story between an author and a physics student, Stamm enjoyed great success with critics and readers alike in 1998. The arts pages celebrated the book as a parable about the power of literature and imagination. In 1999, Stamm continued his literary explorations of the impossibility of relationships with the highly acclaimed collection of short stories "Blitzeis" (Black Ice), which earned him high praise from Marcel Reich-Ranicki and his colleagues on ZDF's "Literarisches Quartett" (Literary Quartet). This was followed by the novel "Ungefähre Landschaft" (Approximate Landscape, 2001), set north of the Arctic Circle, the novel An einem Tag wie diesem (2006) about a terminal illness, the love triangle Sieben Jahre (2009), and the impressive short story collections Wir fliegen (2008) and Seerücken (2011).

Peter Stamm, who also worked as a playwright and radio playwright and spent many years as a journalist for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Weltwoche, and the satirical magazine Nebelspalter, studied English, psychology, and psychopathology. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Rauriser Literaturpreis (1999), the Rheingau Literaturpreis (2000), the Preis der Stadt Zürich (2003), the Kulturpreis der Stadt Winterthur (2003), and the Bodensee-Literaturpreis (2012).