Urs Widmer

Urs Widmer (21 May 1938 – 2 April 2014) was a Swiss novelist, playwright, an essayist, and a short story writer. Widmer was born in Basel in 1938, and for many years lived in Zurich. Widmer studied German, French, and history at the universities of Basel and Montpellier. After completing his PhD, he worked briefly as an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, but left the publishing house during the Lektoren-Aufstand ("Editors' Revolt") of 1968. In 2014, Roman Bucheli, Literary Editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, said that Widmer: