The Brothers Grimm (Author) Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) were the foremost among many German collectors and authors of folktales. The brothers spent their lives together, from their childhood in Hesse to their careers in civil parliament and at the University of Berlin. In their last years, the Grimms devoted their time to work on a dictionary of the German language, which was left unfinished. Thomas Mann (Author) Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks , his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain , was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner . Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955. E.T.A. Hoffmann (Author) ERNST THEODOR AMADEUS HOFFMANN (1776-1822) was one of the most important writers of German Romanticism.

He is probably best remembered for his novellas and short stories, which combine fantastical elements with a darker realism and examine the harmful effect of the unfettered imagination on the pathological mind. His novella The Sandman inspired Delibes' ballet Coppelia , whilst The Nutcracker and the Mouseking became the basis of Tchaikovsky's much-loved Christmas ballet. Martin Suter (Author) Martin Suter is a novelist, screenwriter, and newspaper columnist born in Zurich, Switzerland. He has written a dozen novels, many of them bestsellers in Europe and translated into thirty-two languages, including The Last Weynfeldt , as well as Allmen and the Dragonflies and its sequel Allmen and the Pink Diamond . Suter lives with his family in Zurich. Peter Stamm (Author) Peter Stamm is the Swiss author of eleven novels, along with several short story collections, plays, and radio dramas. Several of his works have been translated into English. He has received several German language literary prizes, and was short-listed for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for his full body of work.