Frau Bartsch

Julian Dillier (1922-2001) is one of the proponents of New Dialect Literature, which began in Switzerland in the early 1970s with Kurt Marti, Ernst Eggimann, Ernst Burren and others. He grew up as the son of the Obwalden farmer's wife in the town hall in Sarnen and made a name for himself early on as an author and director for amateur theatre in central Switzerland and as a promoter of regional literature.From 1969, after he moved from Obwalden to Basel, several books with his poems in Obwalden dialect were published. Until his retirement in 1987, he worked as an editor for SRF and in this function promoted dialect literature in Switzerland and in neighbouring countries. He has received several awards for his literary work, including the Obwaldner, the Innerschweizer and the Oberrheinischer Kulturpreis as well as the Friedestrompreis for supraregional services to German-language dialect poetry. "Frau Bartsch" (1989), an autobiographical story from the author's childhood in Sarner, is his only prose work in High German.