Max Frisch
"I'm Not Stiller" started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year, but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies. The next novel, "Homo Faber", was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998. "The Fire Raisers" and "Andorra" are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage. The two plays, along with "Homo Faber" became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, "Homo Faber", has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Malcolm Afford
Max Afford wrote three novels while in his twenties, which were later published in England and America. He worked as a reporter at the "News and Mail" from 1926 to 1931. His first story was published in "Smith's Weekly" in 1928. In 1936 he won the "Advertiser"'s centenary play competition with "William Light The Founder" (later titled "Awake My Love"). His 'Jeffrey Blackburn' novels included "Blood on His Hands!" (London, 1936) and "Death's Mannikins" (London, 1937). Many were dramatised for radio, starring Peter Finch and Neva Carr Glyn as the husband-and-wife detective team. Afford wrote eight crime novels, usually employing English settings, and more than sixty radio and stage plays, usually stories of crime involving the sifting of situations that ultimately uncover the perpetrators. He was considered somewhat of a pioneer of the "whodunit" in radio broadcasting.
A science fiction story, "The Gland Men of the Island", appeared in "Wonder Stories" in January 1931.
Afford was one of the first contract writers to be engaged by the ABC. In 1936, he won three playwriting awards, and was appointed Staff Dramatist by the ABC, with whom he was contracted for six years. During this time he wrote 30 one-and-a-half-hour plays, 15 serials, more than 100 play adaptations, and produced a number of his own plays. From 1941 he wrote children's and adult radio serials including "Hagen's Circus" (800 episodes) for radio 2GB and 2UE.