Francesco Piccolo

Francesco Piccolo is an Italian novelist and screenwriter born in 1964 in Caserta, Campania. He is one of Italy's most celebrated literary writers and a highly successful screenwriter, responsible for the scripts of some of Italy's most acclaimed recent films including The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, dir. Paolo Sorrentino) and We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam, dir. Nanni Moretti). Piccolo is the author of several novels and essay collections, including Storie di primogeniti e figli unici (1996), Allegro occidentale (2004), and Momenti di trascurabile felicità (Moments of Negligible Happiness, 2010), a celebrated book of micro-essays about the small pleasures of daily life. Il desiderio di essere come tutti (The Desire to Be Like Everyone), his 2014 Premio Strega winner, is a semi-autobiographical novel examining the contradictions of left-wing Italian identity through the author's own political and personal history. The book is both a generational memoir and a political essay, written with Piccolo's characteristic wit and self-deprecating intelligence. Piccolo is a central figure in contemporary Italian culture, equally at home in cinema and literature, and his Prize Strega win was celebrated as recognition of one of Italy's most versatile and intelligent creative minds.