Andrea Bajani

Andrea Bajani is an Italian novelist, poet, and playwright born in 1975 in Rome. He has lived and worked in Turin, Paris, and the United States, where he has held teaching positions at several universities. His work is known for its lyrical, precise prose and its concern with grief, memory, and the difficulty of mourning. Bajani is the author of several novels, including Mi spezzo ma non m'impiego (2006), Cordiali saluti (2005), Se consideri le colpe (2007), and Il libro delle case (2021). He has also written essays and theatrical works. His fiction is consistently attentive to loss and to the ways in which absences shape identity. L'anniversario (The Anniversary), his 2025 Premio Strega winner, is a novel about a man who returns to the Italian countryside to mark the anniversary of his father's death, and in doing so begins to excavate the complicated legacy of their relationship. The novel is characteristic Bajani — spare, elegiac, and emotionally precise. Bajani is regarded as one of the most accomplished stylists in contemporary Italian fiction, a writer whose work is admired for its quiet emotional intensity and its formal refinement.