Markus Werner

Markus Werner (1944–2016) was born in Eschlikon, Switzerland, and raised in the canton of Schaffhausen. He studied German language and literature at the University of Zurich, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the work of Max Frisch. For most of the 1970s and ’80s, he was a teacher—a profession from which he retired eagerly in 1990 to become a full-time writer. As he put it in a rare self-portrait: "I smoke, write haltingly, and live in the country." He wrote very haltingly, or rather meticulously indeed, publishing seven novels in the course of twenty years—among them Zündel’s Exit (1984), Cold Shoulder (1989), and On the Edge (2004).

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