Maria Attanasio

Born in Caltagirone, Italy, in 1943, Attanasio is the author of five collections of poetry and four works of historical fiction. Her 2007 work, Il Falsario di Caltagirone, was the recipient of the prestigious Premio Vittorini. An ironic, often visionary, intensely political poet, Attanasio sees her poetry as a form of “vertical writing” (“scrittura verticale“), a definition that well describes her dense, intellectually rigorous and demanding poetic style, which is influenced by the German Expressionists (Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl), the French Surrealists (Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard), and the leftist Italian avant-gardes of the twentieth century (Giorgio Caproni, Franco Fortini. Alfonso Gatti, Giancarlo Majorino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Amalia Rosselli).