Urs Widmer (21 May 1938 – 2 April 2014) was a Swiss novelist, playwright, an essayist, and a short story writer.

[1][2] Widmer was born in Basel in 1938, and for many years lived in Zurich.

[1] Widmer studied German, French, and history at the universities of Basel and Montpellier.

[1] 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.

[1] In 2014, Roman Bucheli, Literary Editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, said that Widmer: