Literary Breakfast

The taste of words, the aroma of coffee, the warmth of conversation: the Valais–Sion Media Library’s event that pairs literature with jam—delicious discussions about the latest literary trends in French-speaking Switzerland and beyond.What if madness could be seen as a form of defiance against a social order that is dysfunctional, marginalizing, and exclusionary? To discuss this, the Valais–Sion Media Library invites you to meet two authors who have written a highly acclaimed debut novel.Our guests: Sarah Orokieta, a Valais-based author of *Rapport d’activité* (published by Zoé in 2026), has written a novel in the form of a diary—filled with caustic humor—kept by a computer scientist who is as rational as he is out of step with society.This debut novel defies expectations and conventions to fully embrace the logic of its narrator: a man who strives to understand others and to figure out what is expected of him. But beyond his inner world, what this atypical, disjointed voice—by turns funny and poignant—evokes is the contemporary world, with all its violence, hopes, contradictions, and absurdity. Olivier Vonlanthen grew up in Fribourg, where he still lives today. After studying French literature and art history, he turned to teaching at the middle school level. In 2022, his first collection of poems, *Ossuaires*, earned him the C.F. Ramuz Poetry Prize. In 2025, his first novel, *Notre-Dame-des-Démolies*, was published by Éditions La Veilleuse. This novel revisits a tragic news story that occurred in 1968 in Montpellier, where Marthe, a companion, murdered the baroness she worked for with nine stab wounds before being committed to a psychiatric hospital. The story is pieced together in fragments in this powerful debut noir novel. Moderator: Stéphanie Schwitter Glassey, author and therapist. Next Literary Breakfast: December 12, 2026, 10 a.m., marking the 100th anniversary of Rilke’s death, featuring Herr Dr. Marcel Lepper, former curator of the Rilke Foundation in Sierre, Anne Salamin, actress, and Dani Mangisch, actor.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.