Martin Suter turns seventeen and a half and 70 years old respectively

He realized that he could write when his German teacher at the Collège Saint Michel in Freiburg read his essay to the class. At 16, the son of an engineer knew that he wanted to become a writer. He dropped out of German studies in Basel after one semester because he didn't like the way texts were dissected there.

He would have loved to write for the student magazine Collibri but they didn't want me," he says. But he was happy to acquire advertisers. One of the clients liked Suter's advertising letter so much that he encouraged him to become a copywriter. Until then, the almost 20-year-old had no idea that such an apprenticeship even existed.

He landed a hit as an apprentice - with the bank slogan "Let your money work for you, you work for your money too". Suter only later realized how cynical the slogan was. Partly because he had to read the sentence in a diary by Max Frisch, who was very annoyed by it. "I was embarrassed," Suter later confessed in an interview.

The advertising prodigy

At 26, Suter was already Creative Director of the renowned Basel advertising agency GGK, later founding his own agency with a partner and becoming President of the Art Directors Club of Switzerland. His good earnings in the advertising industry allowed him to take time out to write reports for GEO and scripts for film and television.

In 1992, Jürg Ramspeck came from the Weltwoche approached him and offered him the chance to write a column about the foibles of business people. He collected 2,000 francs, and later more, for each "Business Class" column until 2004, when he joined the Weltwoche then three years in the Magazine of the Tages-Anzeiger. After being asked whether it could be done a little more cheaply, he wrote an article without an ending. He wrote that the punch line would have to be omitted for cost reasons.

Suter's first novel "Small World" was published in 1997 and was a resounding success. However, his second, "Die Gedächtnislagune" (The Memory Lagoon), "scared him off" and fortunately was not printed, Suter later confessed. Of the 14 novels published to date - ten major and four somewhat less ambitious ones from the "Allmen" series - none of them have "put him off", and nine have been made into films.

You catch bees with honey

Suter has also written four plays and several screenplays, the most successful of which was probably for the film "Giulias Verschwinden" (Giulia's Disappearance), which won the Audience Award in Locarno, as well as song lyrics for Stephan Eicher and the musical comedy "Geri" with him, based on the "Richtig leben mit Geri Weibel" columns.

Martin Suter caught his personal happiness with a pot of honey in the 1970s. After marrying the painter Vivian Wild at the age of 20 and traveling with her through Africa and India, among other places, he met his current wife Margrith Nay. During a visit to friends in Ibiza, he was asked to bring a pot of honey to Basel for Nay, whom he did not know.

The wrath of the gods

Suter and his second wife had been living in the same Guatemalan town of Panajachel, where his ex also lives, during the European winter since the 1980s. The Suters spent their summers in Ibiza. A few years ago, they moved to Zurich to give their adopted daughter Anna a stress-free education.

Together with Anna, the Suters had adopted her brother Antonio in Guatemala. But in 2009, the boy choked on a bite of food that had gone down the wrong throat. Suter said at the time that he felt as if he had incurred the wrath of the gods with the great good fortune he had experienced.

The tiresome trivial debate

Suter's career did not run entirely smoothly. He was repeatedly accused of writing trivial literature. "We should have
usually just like aesthetically complex," said one reviewer of the NZZ - "and unsuccessful" countered Suter.

The author was far more viciously attacked in 2011 by Ulrich Greiner in the TimeIn short: "Suter can't write" was his conclusion, after he had accused the writer of making mistakes, for example with the Consecutio temporum.

For his part, Suter sees himself as an entertainment writer: "I try to tell a story in which a beautiful sentence doesn't stick out every few meters like an obstacle on a
Fitness course. The language of a novel should discreetly serve the story."

"My stories start on the first page and end on the last. If they have an effect beyond that, then I'm happy. But that's not my intention. I don't have a message," he recently said at a workshop at the Solothurn Film Festival.

Always impeccably dressed

Martin Suter is a professional author with a strong work ethic; he works to a fixed timetable like most other working people. He doesn't lounge around in his trainer, but always wears a suit and tie.

When he was researching the homeless scene for his latest bestseller "Elefant", one of those affected advised him not to come in a tie. So Suter simply left the tie off. (Irene Widmer/SDA)