Gianni Celati

Gianni Celati is an Italian writer, translator and literary critic.

Biography

Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio in 1937, but spent his infancy and adolescence in the province of Ferrara. He graduated in English literature at the University of Bologna, where he has been teaching for years (he also taught at the Université de Caen, at Cornell University, and at Brown University).

His first book, "Comiche", was published in 1970 with a presentation by Italo Calvino. His three novels "Le avventure di Guizzardi" (1972), "La banda dei sospiri" (1976), and "Lunario del paradiso" (1978) were later published together in "Parlamenti buffi" (1998), with a leave-letter of the author to his own book. In 1985, he wrote the stories of "Narratori delle pianure", translated by Robert Lumley as "Voices from the plains" (1989); in 1987 "Quattro novelle sulle apparenze", translated by Stuart Hood as "Appearances" (1991); and in 1989 "Verso la foce".

In 1994, he wrote "L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa", from Matteo Maria Boiardo. In 1998, he collected his notes from African travelling in "Avventure in Africa". This book was awarded with the Zerilli-Marimò Prize for Italian Fiction. It was translated by Adria Bernardi as "Adventures in Africa". The English edition contains a foreword by Rebecca West, who also made a decisive study on Celati's literary views with "Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling", University of Toronto Press, 2000. Other stories were collected in "Cinema naturale" (2001), and in "Fata Morgana" (2005). In 2006, he won the Viareggio Prize for his novel "Vite di pascolanti".

Celati has translated works by Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Stendhal, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Mark Twain, Roland Barthes, Jack London, Henri Michaux, and others.