Frau Bartsch

Julian Dillier (1922-2001) is one of the representatives of the New Dialect Literature that emerged in Switzerland in the early 1970s alongside Kurt Marti, Ernst Eggimann, Ernst Burren, and others. He grew up as the son of the local mayor in the town hall of Sarnen and quickly made a name for himself as an author and director of amateur theater in Central Switzerland, as well as a promoter of regional literature. Starting in 1969, after moving from Obwalden to Basel, several books of his poems in Obwaldner dialect were published. Until his retirement in 1987, he worked as an editor at SRF, where he advocated for dialect literature in Switzerland and neighboring countries. He received multiple awards for his literary work, including the Obwaldner, Innerschweizer, and Oberrheinischer Culture Prize, as well as the Friedestrom Prize for his contributions to German-language dialect poetry. "Frau Bartsch" (1989), an autobiographical narrative from the author's childhood in Sarnen, is his only prose work in standard German.