Literary tips in December

On the one hand, according to statistics, more than every second person living in the city of Zurich has at least one parent who was born abroad. On the other hand, only just over two per cent of the Swiss population live more than 100 kilometres away from the place where they grew up. What does this simultaneity of internationality, multilingualism and strong local roots do to us? How does it affect our lives, thoughts and actions? Usama Al Shamani ("In falling, the pen learns to fly") and the Lower Engadin poet Leta Semadeni will talk about this. The discussion will be moderated by Iryna Herasimovich.

More than 300 years after the death of Anna Margaretha Gessner, née Kitt, her handwritten cookery book has been woken from its slumber in the archives. Four authors have worked their way through the hard-to-read handwriting in the "Kittin's Cookbook" and recooked and modernised a selection of the recipes. There are songbirds, preserved, complete with feathers or fried butter balls. However, the cookery book not only provides an insight into the bourgeois diet, but also illustrates the social and financial disparities of the time. While some had to live on almost nothing, others revelled in abundance. Unfortunately still as relevant today as it was then.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Glauser (1896-1938) led a restless life. Countless places and stations lined his path, including prisons and psychiatric clinics or the Foreign Legion, all of which also flowed into his literary legacy, including his famous Wachtmeister Studer series. Even today, Glauser is considered one of the first and most important crime writers in the German-speaking world. His love letters are less well known, even though they are among the "most beautiful, colourful and moving" that the era has to offer, as Manfred Papst writes in the NZZ. Passionate, desperate, charming, sly, hopeful, cheeky and sometimes bottomlessly unjust ... Go and listen.

The spoken word show for the end of the year, for all those who need a break from the festive feast and Christmas tree between the holidays. Poets from all over the German-speaking world will shake the boards one last time and bid farewell to the outgoing year, reviewing it once again with rousing poems and provocative texts. Among them: the reigning Swiss champion Moët Liechti, slam legend Timo Brunke from Stuttgart, Marvin Suckut from Constance, and the winner of the Salzburg Bull, our very own Patty Basler, as well as Simon Leasing from Baden.