Emanuele Trevi

Emanuele Trevi is an Italian novelist and critic born in 1964 in Rome. He is one of Italy's most respected literary critics and essayists as well as a distinguished novelist. He has written extensively on Italian and European literature, and his critical sensibility deeply informs his fiction, which often takes real writers, artists, and intellectuals as its subjects. Trevi is the author of several works of fiction and criticism, including Il libro della gioia perpetua (2010) and Qualcosa di scritto (2012, Premio Viareggio), a memoir-essay about working for the writer Pier Paolo Pasolini's literary estate. His work consistently occupies the fertile space between biography, essay, and novel. Due vite (Two Lives), his 2021 Premio Strega winner, is a short, luminous memoir about his friendship with two fellow writers — Rocco Carbone and Pia Pera — both of whom died young. The book is a meditation on friendship, writing, and loss, told with great simplicity and emotional exactness. Due vite was widely celebrated as a minor masterpiece: a book that achieves enormous emotional depth through extreme economy. Trevi is regarded as one of the most intelligent and humane voices in Italian literary culture.