Tommaso Landolfi

Tommaso Landolfi (August 9 1908 - 1979) was an Italian author and translator.

Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is "An Autumn Story". Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II.

Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.

elected works

* "Dialogo dei massimi sistemi" (1937)
* "La pietra lunare" (1939)
* "II mar delle blatte e altre storie" (1939)
* "Racconto d'autunno" ("An Autumn Story", 1947)
* "Cancroregina" ("Cancerqueen", 1950)
* "Le due zittelle" (1952)
* "La biére du pécheur" (1953)
* "Ombre" (1954)
* "Rien va" (1963)
* "Des mois" (1967)
* "A caso" (1975)