ALESSANDRO BARICCO – Writer

(Turin, 1958 -)

Alessandro Baricco graduated in Philosophy and works in the field of advertisement. He started his career as a music critic on the daily newspaper “La Repubblica” and as an editorial contributor in the cultural page of “La Stampa”. In the first years of the 1990s he collaborated with various RAI television programs: “Love is an arrow”, presented to draw a wide television audience to the world of Lyric Opera, and Pickwick, of reading and writing, dedicated to literature, in which he appeared together with journalist Giovanna Zucconi. Following those years (1994) Baricco founded a school of narrative techniques in Turin where he himself taught. Among his most famous novels we remember Castelli di rabbia (literally “wrath castles”, translated as Lands of Glass) (1991), with which he won the “Campiello” prize and the “Prix Médicis étranger” (The Medici prize for foreign literature); Oceano mare (Ocean Sea) (1993), Seta (Silk) (1996) and City (1999). In 1994 he published Novecento (The Pianist on the Ocean) a monologue/novel from which a theater drama and a film where created. Two years later, he produced Davila Rosa, a work for the theater that was staged by Luca Ronconi. In 2001 he accepted to write the script of the short film “125 years of work” directed by Wim Wenders and commissioned by Barilla to celebrate its 125th anniversary in 2002.

Cecilia Farinelli