Crime fans know and love Simenon’s Maigret stories, and British readers are increasingly becoming familiar with his romans durs, his ‘hard novels’. These are not necessarily
Sicilian literature is famous worldwide, appreciated by readers and taught in universities too. One of the reasons for its success lies in the diverse cultural heritage of Sicily,
In my early years in the profession I liked going into prisons. Around the age of thirty, it gave me the feeling I was someone who was dealing with serious things. Someone on whose
Could this be the Great Italian Novel? Possibly not since Riccardo Bacchelli (a now largely forgotten writer whose epic trilogy ‘The Mill on the Po’ (1938-40) traced the fortun
I recently was asked by the Italian Cultural Institute in London to edit an anthology of translated extracts from works by neglected twentieth-century Italian writers, particularly
Walking past Waterstones on Piccadilly in late August, I was struck by their colourful window display for Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City, translated for the fir
FOUR TRANSLATORS DISCUSS THE CHALLENGES AND JOYS OF TRANSLATING ITALIAN LITERATURE – With Howard Curtis, Richard Dixon, Katherine Gregor, Lori Hetherington This month, rather tha
This is Gianrico Carofiglio’s latest outing for his campaigning lawyer, Guido Guerrieri from Puglia (his name implies ‘warrior’). We left him in A Fine Line (reviewed here in
It is 1493. Renaissance Milan is ruled by Ludovico Sforza, known as il Moro. Ten years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci wrote to il Moro, boasting of his engineering prowess and saying t
In his last novel (A Fine Line, see my review of May 2016), we left Carofiglio’s lawyer-hero Guido Guerrieri musing ruefully and bitterly on the ethics of the legal profession, a
