Umberto Eco

Tuesday, 25 December 2012

Umberto Eco, Part 1 | Nov. 16, 2011 | Appel Salon

Umberto Eco in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

On the Ashes of Post-Modernism: A New Realism. A Conference with Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco: The Vertigo of Lists - France

Umberto Eco, Part 2 | Nov. 16, 2011 | Appel Salon

Il caffè letterario - 10 - Umberto Eco racconta Victor Hugo

PIERRE BAYARD & UMBERTO ECO - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - NYPL Live

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Accademia dei Lincei
The Accademia dei Lincei, (literally the "Academy of the Lynx-Eyed", but also known as the Lincean Academy), is an Italian science academy, located at the Palazzo Corsini on the Via della Lungara in Rome, Italy.
Founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi, it was the first academy of sciences to persist in Italy and a locus for the incipient scientific revolution. The academy was named after the lynx, an animal whose sharp vision symbolizes the observational prowess required by science. It was revived in the 1870s to become the national academy of Italy, encompassing both literature and science among its concerns.
The Pontifical Academy of Science also claims a heritage descending from the first two incarnations of the Academy, by way of the Accademia Pontificia dei Nuovi Lincei ("Pontifical Academy of the New Lynxes"), founded in 1847.
The first Accademia dei Lincei was founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi, an aristocrat from Umbria (the son of Duke of Acquasparta and a member of an important family from Rome) who was passionately interested in natural history - particularly botany. The academy replaced the first scientific community ever, Giambattista della Porta's Academia Secretorum Naturae in Naples that had been closed by the Inquisition. Cesi founded the Accademia dei Lincei with three friends: the Dutch physician Johannes Van Heeck (italianized to Giovanni Ecchio) and two fellow Umbrians, mathematician Francesco Stelluti and polymath Anastasio de Filiis. Cesi and his friends aimed to understand all of the natural sciences. This emphasis that set the Lincei apart from the host of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian Academies that were mostly literary and antiquarian. Cesi envisioned a program of free experiment that was respectful of tradition yet unfettered by blind obedience to any authority, even that of Aristotle and Ptolemy whose theories the new science was calling into question.

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Alessandria
Alessandria listen (help·info) (Lissandria in Piedmontese) is a city and comune in Piedmont, Italy, and the capital of the Province of Alessandria. The city is sited on the alluvial plane between the Tanaro and the Bormida rivers, c. 90 km southeast of Turin.
Alessandria is also a major railway hub.
Alessandria was founded in 1168 with a charter as a free commune; it was sited upon a preexisting urban nucleus, to serve as a stronghold for the Lombard League, defending the traditional liberties of the communes of northern Italy against the Imperial forces of Frederick Barbarossa. Alessandria stood in the territories of the marchese of Montferrat, a staunch ally of the Emperor, with a name assumed in 1168 to honor the Emperor's opponent, Pope Alexander III. In 1174–75 the fortress was sorely tested by Imperial siege and stood fast. A legend (related in Umberto Eco's book Baudolino, and which recalls one concerning Bishop Herculanus’ successful defense of Perugia several centuries earlier) says it was saved by a quick-witted peasant, Gagliaudo: he fed his cow with the last grain remaining within the city, then took it outside the city walls until he reached the Imperial camp. Here he was captured, and his cow cut open to be cooked: when the Imperials found the cow's stomach filled with grain, Gagliaudo was asked the reason to waste such a rich meal. He answered that he was forced to feed his cow with grain because there was such a lot of it, and no room to place it within the city. The Emperor, fearing that the siege would last too long, left Alessandria free. (Malaria was probably the real cause of his departure.) A statue of Gagliaudo can be found on the left corner of the city cathedral.

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Germany
Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.

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Harvard University
Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.

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Italy
Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.

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John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. (born February 8, 1955) is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.
John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade. He also served in the House of Representatives in Mississippi from January 1984 to September 1990. He began writing his first novel, A Time To Kill, in 1984, and it was published in June 1989.
As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. A Galaxy British Book Awards winner, Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing, the others being Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.
Grisham's first best seller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel." Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, Skipping Christmas, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and A Time to Kill. His books have been translated into 29 languages and published worldwide.

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Milan
Milan (Italian: Milano [miˈlaːno] ( listen); Lombard: [miˈlan]; Latin: Mediolanum) is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital of Lombardy as well as of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area is the 5th largest in EU and the largest in Italy with an estimated population of approximately 5 million. The growth of many suburbs and satellite settlements around the city proper, following the Italian economic miracle of 1950s–60s and massive commuting flows, suggest that socioeconomic linkages have expanded well beyond the boundaries of its administrative limits and its agglomeration, creating a region of approximately 9,3 million people. It has been suggested that the Milan metropolitan area is part of the so-called Blue Banana, the area of Europe with the highest population and industrial density. Its health care and education system is considered one of the best of Europe.

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New Jersey
New Jersey (ⁱ/nuː ˈdʒɜrzi/) is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the U.S. state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania, and on the southwest by Delaware. New Jersey is the 4th least extensive, but the 11th most populous and the most densely populated of the 50 United States. New Jersey lies mostly within the sprawling metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia. It is also the third wealthiest by 2009–2010 median household income.
The area was inhabited by Native Americans for more than 2,800 years, with historical tribes such as the Lenape along the coast. In the early 17th century, the Dutch and the Swedes made the first European settlements. The British later seized control of the region, naming it the Province of New Jersey. It was granted as a colony to Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton. At this time, it was named after the largest of the British Channel Islands, Jersey, Carteret's birthplace. New Jersey was the site of several decisive battles during the American Revolutionary War.

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RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. (for brevity Rai S.p.A.) known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy. It competes with three major private television companies, Mediaset, Telecom Italia Media, and Sky Italia.
Rai operates several television channels and radio stations, broadcasting in analog terrestrial (until 2013), in digital terrestrial and in several satellite and IPTV offerings. In 1950, Rai became one of the 23 founding broadcasting organisations of the European Broadcasting Union.
Half of Rai's revenues come from the broadcast licence fee, the other half from advertising. Rai has a relatively high audience share of 42.3%.
Due to their close proximity, Albania, Switzerland, Monaco, Malta, San Marino, Vatican City, Montenegro, Slovenia and Croatia also receive broadcasts.
Unione Radiofonica Italiana (URI) was formed in 1924 with the backing of the Marconi Company following a model adopted in other European countries. URI made its inaugural broadcast — a speech by Benito Mussolini at Teatro Costanzi — on 5 October and regular programming began with a quartet performing Haydn's Opera 7 from the Palazzo Corradi the following evening. At 21:00 CET, Ines Donarelli Viviani announced for the first time: "URI—Unione Radiofonica Italiana Rome station 1RO 425 meters wavelength. To all those who are listening our greetings, good evening."Guglielmo Marconi's S.A. Radiofono—Società Italiana per le Radiocomunicazioni Circolari (Radiofono) held 85% of URI shares and Western Electric's Società Italiana Radio Audizioni Circolari (SIRAC) held the remaining 15%.

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Reggio Calabria
Reggio di Calabria (Italian pronunciation: [ˈrɛddʒo di kaˈlaːbrja]; Calabrian dialect: Rìggiu, Greek-Calabrian: Righi, Greek: Ῥήγιον, Rhegion, Latin: Rhegium), commonly known as Reggio Calabria listen (help·info) or Reggio, is the biggest city and the most populated comune of Calabria, southern Italy, and is the capital of the Province of Reggio Calabria and seat of the Council of Calabrian government.
Reggio is located on the "toe" of the Italian peninsula and is separated from the island of Sicily by the Strait of Messina. It is situated on the slopes of the Aspromonte, a long, craggy mountain range that runs up through the center of the region. The region is subject to earthquakes and tsunami. It is the largest and oldest city in the region and is the second oldest city in Italy overall. The third economic center of mainland Southern Italy and is well known as a port and university city. The city has a population of 186,547 spread over 236 km², while the fast-growing urban area numbers 260,000 inhabitants. Another 370,429 people live in the metropolitan area (the 10th metropolitan city of the Italian nation).

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Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey /ˈrʌtɡərz/, usually referred to as Rutgers University or just Rutgers, is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American Revolution. Rutgers was originally a private university affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church and admitted only male students, but evolved into a coeducational public research university. Rutgers is one of only two colonial colleges that later became public universities, the other being The College of William and Mary.
Rutgers was designated The State University of New Jersey by acts of the New Jersey Legislature in 1945 and 1956. The three campuses of Rutgers are in (1) New Brunswick and Piscataway, (2) Newark and (3) Camden. The Newark campus was formerly the University of Newark, which merged into the Rutgers system in 1946, and the Camden campus was created in 1950 from the College of South Jersey and the South Jersey Law School. Rutgers is the largest state university within New Jersey. The university offers more than 100 distinct bachelor, 100 master, and 80 doctoral and professional degree programs across 175 academic departments, 29 degree-granting schools and colleges, 16 of which offer graduate programs of study.

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Timbuktu
Timbuktu ( /ˌtɪmbʌkˈtuː/; Koyra Chiini: Tumbutu; French: Tombouctou), formerly also spelled Timbuctoo and Timbuktoo, is a town in the West African nation of Mali situated 15 km (9.3 mi) north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The town is the capital of the Timbuktu Region, one of the eight administrative regions of Mali. It had a population of 54,453 in the 2009 census.
Starting out as a seasonal settlement, Timbuktu became a permanent settlement early in the 12th century. After a shift in trading routes, Timbuktu flourished from the trade in salt, gold, ivory and slaves, and it became part of the Mali Empire early in the 13th century. In the first half of the 15th century the Tuareg tribes took control of the city for a short period until the expanding Songhay Empire absorbed the city in 1468. A Moroccan army defeated the Songhay in 1591, and made Timbuktu, rather than Gao, their stronghold. The invaders established a new ruling class, the arma, who after 1612 became independent of Morocco. However, the golden age of the city was over and it entered a long period of decline. Different tribes governed until the French took over in 1893, a situation that lasted until it became part of the current Republic of Mali in 1960. Presently Timbuktu is impoverished and suffers from desertification. Several initiatives are being undertaken to restore the historic manuscripts still kept in the city. Meanwhile, tourism forms an important source of income.

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University of Oxford
Coordinates: 51°45′40″N 1°15′12″W / 51.7611°N 1.2534°W / 51.7611; -1.2534
The University of Oxford (informally Oxford University or Oxford) is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096. The University grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. In post-nominals, the University of Oxford was historically abbreviated as Oxon. (from the Latin Oxoniensis), although Oxf is now used in official university publications.
After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge, where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two ancient English universities have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. In addition to their cultural and practical associations, as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other.

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University of Turin
The University of Turin (Italian Università degli Studi di Torino, or often abbreviated to UNITO) is a university in the city of Turin in the Piedmont region of north-western Italy. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe, and continues to play an important role in research and training.
The University of Turin was founded as a studium in 1404, under the initiative of Prince Ludovico di Savoia. From 1427 to 1436 the seat of the university was transferred to Chieri and Savigliano. It was closed in 1536, and reestablished by Duke Emmanuel Philibert thirty years later. It started to gain its modern shape following the model of the University of Bologna, although significant development did not occur until the reforms made by Victor Amadeus II, who also created the Collegio delle Province for students not natives of Turin.
With the reforms carried out by Victor Amadeus II, the University of Turin became a new reference model for many other universities. During the 18th century, the University faced an enormous growth in faculty and endowment size, becoming a point of reference of the Italian Positivism. Notable scholars of this period include Cesare Lombroso, Carlo Forlanini and Arturo Graf.

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Urbino
Urbino listen (help·info) is a walled city in the Marche region of Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482. The town, nestled on a high sloping hillside, retains much of its picturesque medieval aspect, only slightly marred by the large car parks below the town. It hosts the University of Urbino, founded in 1506, and is the seat of the Archbishop of Urbino. Its best-known architectural piece is the Palazzo Ducale, rebuilt by Luciano Laurana.
The modest Roman town of Urvinum Mataurense ("the little city on the river Mataurus") became an important strategic stronghold in the Gothic Wars of the 6th century, captured in 538 from the Ostrogoths by the Byzantine general Belisarius, and frequently mentioned by the historian Procopius.
Though Pippin presented Urbino to the Papacy, independent traditions were expressed in its commune, until, around 1200, it came into the possession of the House of Montefeltro. Although these noblemen had no direct authority over the commune, they could pressure it to elect them to the position of podestà, a title that Bonconte di Montefeltro managed to obtain in 1213, with the result that Urbino's population rebelled and formed an alliance with the independent commune of Rimini (1228), finally regaining control of the town in 1234. Eventually, though, the Montefeltro noblemen took control once more, and held it until 1508. In the struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines where factions supported either the Papacy or the Holy Roman Empire, the 13th and 14th century Montefeltro lords of Urbino were leaders of the Ghibellines of the Marche and in the Romagna region.

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Agota Kristof
Ágota Kristóf (Hungarian: Kristóf Ágota; October 30, 1935 – July 27, 2011) was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008.
Agota Kristof was born in Csikvánd, Hungary on October 30, 1935. At the age of 21 she had to leave her country when the Hungarian anti-communist revolution was suppressed by the Soviet military. She, her husband (who used to be her history teacher at school) and their 4 month-old daughter escaped to Neuchâtel in Switzerland. After 5 years of loneliness and exile, she quit her work in a factory and left her husband. She started studying French and began to write novels in that language.
Kristof's first steps as a writer were in the realm of poetry and theater (John et Joe, Un rat qui passe), aspects of her writing that did not have as great an impact as her trilogy. In 1986 Kristof’s first novel, The Notebook appeared. It was the beginning of a moving trilogy. The sequel titled The Proof came 2 years later. The third part was published in 1991 under the title The Third Lie. The most important themes of this trilogy are war and destruction, love and loneliness, promiscuous, desperate, and attention-seeking sexual encounters, desire and loss, truth and fiction.

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Alain Rey
Alain Rey (pronounced: [a.lɛ̃ ʁɛ]) (born August 30, 1928) is a French linguist, lexicographer and radio personality. He is the editor-in-chief at French dictionary publisher Dictionnaires Le Robert.
Rey was born in Pont-du-Château on August 30, 1928. After studying political science, humanities and art history at the Sorbonne, Rey served in the 4th Regiment of the Tunisian Troops. While stationed in Algeria in 1952, he replied to an advertisement placed by Paul Robert, who was compiling a new French dictionary and looking for linguists. Rey become Robert's first collaborator, on Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique. Robert's network of lexicographers grew and Rey married his colleague Josette Debove in 1954. In 1964 the very first Le Robert dictionary was published, followed by an abridged Le Petit Robert in 1967.
Rey went on to supervise the publication of many more dictionaries under the Le Robert trademark: the Petit Robert (1967); the Micro Robert, a pocket dictionary; the Petit Robert des noms propres (1974), a guide to proper names; the Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions (1979), a dictionary of phrases and expressions; the Grand Robert de la langue française, a nine-volume work (1985); an updated version, the Nouveau Petit Robert de la langue française (1993), and the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (1992). In 2005, he published the Dictionnaire culturel en langue française.

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Alberto Bevilacqua
Alberto Bevilacqua (born 27 June 1934, Parma) is an Italian writer and filmmaker. Leonardo Sciascia, an Italian writer and politician, read Bevilacqua's first collection of stories, The Dust on the Grass (1955), was impressed and published it. Mario Colombi Guidotti, responsible for the literary supplement of the Journal of Parma, began to publish his stories in the early 1950s.
Friendship Lost, his first book of poems, was published in 1961. Caliph, published in 1964, was his break-through novel. The protagonist, Irene Corsini, imbued with his own sweet and energetic temperament, is one of the strongest female characters in Italian literature. His novel This Kind of Love won the Campiello Prize in 1966. In both This Kind of Love and Caliph, Bevilacqua oversaw the adaptations and productions of the film versions. This Kind of Love won Best Film at Cannes.
Bevilacqua is also a poet. His writings have been translated throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, China and Japan. In 2010, his seven "stories" as he likes to call them, are included in the Novels volume of the prestigious series "I Meridiani.”

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Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle (November 28, 1907 – September 26, 1990) was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism.
He is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (published in 1929), and for the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista (The Conformist), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his translated to the cinema are Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt) filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963); La Noia (Boredom), filmed with that title by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas in 1964; and La Ciociara filmed by Vittorio de Sica as Two Women (1960). Cedric Kahn's L'Ennui (1998) is another version of La Noia. He was an atheist.
Alberto Pincherle (the pen-name "Moravia" is the surname of his maternal grandfather) was born on Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish Venetian father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic Anconitan mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was of Dalmatian origin. Her brother Augusto De Marsanich, Moravia's uncle, was an undersecretary in the National Fascist Party cabinet.

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Aleksandar Tišma
Aleksandar Tišma (January 16, 1924 in Horgoš, Kanjiža – 16 February 2003 in Novi Sad) was a Serbian novelist.
He completed the basic and middle school in Novi Sad and studied economy and French language and literature in Budapest during World War II, to finally graduate on Germanistics from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology. From 1945-1949 he worked as a journalist for Slobodna Vojvodina and Borba, then as an editor and redactor in Matica Srpska up to retirement in 1982.
He was a corresponding member of the Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1979 and regular since 1984, and subsequently regular member of the Serbian Academy upon their fusion 1992. Since 2002, he was also a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
Tišma was occupied with themes of human seeking for freedom, and suffering, violence, horror and guilt they encounter on the way. Along with Czesław Miłosz, Danilo Kiš and György Konrád, he was sometimes classified into the literature of "Mitteleuropa"—dark and contemplative, yet humanistic and thought-provoking.

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Alessandro Barbero
Alessandro Barbero (born April 30, 1959 in Turin) is an Italian historian, novelist and essayist. He attended the University of Turin where he studied literature and Medieval history. He won the 1996 Strega Prize, Italy's most distinguished literary award, for Bella vita e guerre altrui di Mr. Pyle gentiluomo. His second novel, Romanzo russo. Fiutando i futuri supplizi, has been translated into English as The Anonymous Novel. Sensing the Future Torments (Sulaisiadar 'san Rudha: Vagabond Voices, 2010). Its critical success in Italy has been repeated in Britain: Franco Cardini wrote in Il Giornale, "Barbero uses the diabolic skills of an erudite and professional narrator to seek out massacres of the distant and recent past. The Anonymous Novel concerns the past-that-never-passes (whether Tsarist or Stalinist) and the future that in 1988 was impending and has now arrived". Allan Massie wrote in The Scotsman, ""If you have any feeling for Russia or for the art of the novel, then read this one. You will find it an enriching experience," and Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Observer, "The Anonymous Novel: Sensing the Future Torments, from a new publisher, Vagabond Voices, situated on the Isle of Lewis, is a vivid novel about Russians coping with the transition from communism to capitalism and combines echoes of Bulgakov with elements of a thriller."

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Alex Haley
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an African-American writer. He is best known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before he returned to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley's father was a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University. The younger Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the obstacles of racism he had overcome. Alex Haley was enrolled at Alcorn State University at age 15. Two years later he returned to his parents to inform them of his withdrawal from college. Simon Haley felt that Alex needed discipline and growth and convinced his son to enlist in the military when he turned 18. On May 24, 1939, Alex Haley began his twenty-year enlistment with the Coast Guard.
He enlisted as a mess attendant and then became a Petty Officer Third Class in the rate of Steward, one of the few rates open to African Americans at that time. His Coast Guard service number was 212-548. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. It is said that during his enlistment he was often paid by other sailors to write love letters to their girlfriends. He talked of how the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long sea voyages wasn't the Japanese but boredom.

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Andrea Camilleri
Andrea Camilleri (born September 6, 1925 in Porto Empedocle) is an Italian writer.
Originally from Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri, began studies at the Faculty of Literature in 1944, without concluding them, meanwhile publishing poems and short stories.
From 1948 to 1950 Camilleri studied stage and film direction at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts (Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica) and began to take on work as a director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and Beckett. As a matter of fact, his parents knew Pirandello and were even distant friends, as he tells in his essay on Pirandello "Biography of the changed son". His most famous works, the Montalbano series show many pirandellian elements: for example, the wild olive tree that helps Montalbano think is on stage in his late work "The giants of the mountain"
With RAI, Camilleri worked on several TV productions, such as Inspector Maigret with Gino Cervi. In 1977 he returned to the Academy of Dramatic Arts, holding the chair of Movie Direction and occupying it for 20 years.

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Andrzej Szczypiorski
Andrzej Szczypiorski (help·info) (Polish pronunciation: [ˈandʐeɪ̯ ʂt͡ʂɨˈpʲɔrski]; February 3, 1928 – May 16, 2000) was a Polish novelist and politician.
He was son of Adam Szczypiorski, a political activist, historian and mathematician, and Jadwiga nee Epsztajn. Andrzej has a sister Wiesława (1924-1945).
He spent his childhood in Warsaw.
During World War II he pursued studied in the underground university movement, called the "flying university" due to the regular movement of its location, and was a partisan of the Polish People’s Army. He was a participant of the Warsaw Uprising. After the Warsaw Uprising he was arrested and condemned to be a prisoner of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in which he survived until 1945.
In 1946-1947 he studied political science in the Warsaw Consular Diplomatic Academy.
In 1948-1956, Szczypiorski worked as an editor and in the theater, in the Katowice Silesian Theater. During this period, in 1952, he made his literary debut in the magazine "Życie Literackie" using the pseudonym 'Maurice S. Andrews' and was inducted into the Polish Writers Union.

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André Schwarz Bart
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Antoine Danchin
Antoine Danchin PhD DSc is a French geneticist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelisation of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics. He is the Chairman of the startup AMAbiotics [1], specialised in metabolic bioremediation and synthetic biology [2]. He was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris where he headed the Genetics of Bacterial Genomes Unit.

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Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci (Italian pronunciation: [anˈtɔːnjo ˈɡramʃi]) (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician, political theorist, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the 20th century. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within modern European thought. He is renowned for his concept of cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.
Gramsci was born in Ales, on the island of Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci (1860–1937), a low-level official from Gaeta, and his wife, Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). Gramsci's father was of Arbëreshë, Albanian descent, while his mother belonged to a local landowning family. The senior Gramsci's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza.

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Antonio Tabucchi
Antonio Tabucchi (Italian pronunciation: [anˈtɔnjo taˈbukki]; September 24, 1943 – March 25, 2012) was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy.
Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet.
His books and essays have been translated in 18 countries, including Japan. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer.
Tabucchi has been awarded the French prize "Médicis étranger" for Indian Nocturne (Notturno indiano) and the premio Campiello, and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira. In later life he was mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a feat he never achieved.

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António Lobo Antunes
António Lobo Antunes, GCSE, MD (Portuguese pronunciation: [ɐ̃ˈtɔniu ˈloβu ɐ̃ˈtunɨʃ]); born 1 September 1942) is a Portuguese novelist and medical doctor.
António Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon as the eldest of six sons of João Alfredo de Figueiredo Lobo Antunes (born 1915), prominent Neurologist and Professor, close collaborator of Egas Moniz, Nobel prize of physiology, and wife Margarida da Beira Cardoso de Melo Machado, daughter of Joaquim José Machado, 70th, 82nd and 91st Governor of Mozambique and 110th Governor of Portuguese India, and wife Mariana Cardoso de Melo. His paternal great-grandfather was an illegitimate son of Bernardo António de Brito Antunes, 1st Viscount of Nazaré. His brother is neurosurgeon João Lobo Antunes.
At the age of seven he decided to be a writer, but when he was 16, his father sent him to the medical school of the University of Lisbon. He graduated as a medical doctor, later specializing in psychiatry. During this time he never stopped writing.
By the end of his education, Lobo Antunes had to serve with the Portuguese Army to take part in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974). In a military hospital in Angola he became interested in the subjects of death and "the other."

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Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was English of Irish descent, and his mother, born Mary Foley, was Irish. They married in 1855. In 1864 the family dispersed due to Charles's growing alcoholism and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. In 1867, the family came together again and lived in the squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place.
Although he is now referred to as "Conan Doyle", the origin of this compound surname is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his Christian name, and simply "Doyle" as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather.

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Augusto Ponzio
Augusto Ponzio (born 17 February 1942) is an Italian semiotician and philosopher.
Since 1980 is Full Professor of Philosophy of Language at Bari University, Italy.
He has made a significant contribution as editor and translator to the dissemination of the ideas of Pietro Ispano, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Lévinas, Karl Marx, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Adam Schaff and Thomas Albert Sebeok, in Italy and abroad.
Augusto Ponzio has authored the first monographs ever at a world level on each of Emmanuel Lévinas, Mikhail Bakhtin and Adam Schaff : respectively, La relation interpersonal, 1967, dedicated to Levinas, Michail Bachtin. Alle origini della semiotic sovietica, 1980, and Persona umana, linguaggio e conoscenza in Adam Schaff, 1977. Each of these monographs has been translated and reworked over the years and presented in new enlarged editions.
He has promoted the Italian translation of numerous works by Mikhail Bakhtin and members of the Bakhtin Circle, including Valentin N. Voloshinov and Pavel N. Medvedev, but also the biologist I. I. Kanaev.

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Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce (Italian pronunciation: [beneˈdetto ˈkroːtʃe]; February 25, 1866 – November 20, 1952) was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade. He had considerable influence on other prominent Italian intellectuals including both marxist Antonio Gramsci and fascist Giovanni Gentile.
Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He came from an influential and wealthy family, and was raised in a very strict Catholic environment. Around the age of 16, he turned away from Catholicism and developed a personal view of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but an historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed. He kept this position for the rest of his life.
In 1883, an earthquake hit the village of Casamicciola, Ischia island, near Naples, where he was on holiday with his family, destroying the home they lived in. His mother, father, and only sister were all killed, while he was buried for a very long time and barely survived. After the incident he inherited his family's fortune and much like Schopenhauer before him was able to live the rest of his life in relative leisure, enabling him to devote a great deal of time to philosophy as an independent intellectual writing from his palazzo in Naples. (Ryn, 2000:xi).

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Bonaventura Tecchi
Bonaventura Tecchi (Bagnoregio, 11 February 1896 - Rome, 18 June 1968) was an Italian writer.
Tecchi was a famous essayist, a Germanist and a novelist. After his classical studies, he graduated in literature at the University of Rome. He was a brave and decorate for value volunteer in the First World War, where he was wounded and taken prisoner at Cellelager, south of Hamburg. This experience, recalled in the 1961 novel Baracca 15C, approached him to the Germanic world and was decisive in the choice to dedicate himself to the study of Germanic literary world.
He was later Professor of German literature at the University of Rome. From 1942 he was Professor of German language and literature at the Institute "Maria Ss. Assunta" in Rome. He received literary awards including the Premio Bancarella, in 1959, with his work Gli egoisti. From 1963 he was member of the Accademia dei Lincei. He published a series of novels, short stories and prose that examined moral and psychological problems analyzed under a Christian perspective.

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Bruno Vespa
Bruno Vespa (born 27 May 1944) is an Italian television and newspaper journalist.
A former director of Italian state-owned TV channel Rai Uno's news program TG1, Vespa is the founding host of the program Porta a Porta (English:"Door to door"), which has been broadcast without interruption on RAI channels since 1996.
Vespa was born in L'Aquila, Abruzzo. He is married to Augusta Iannini, who is a judge.
Vespa began working with the local press in his native Abruzzo at a relatively young age, authoring sports articles for the L'Aquila branch of the newspaper Il Tempo when he was sixteen years old.
In 1962 he became a radio announcer on RAI broadcasts and, after obtaining his LL.B. in 1968, began hosting the daily newscast Telegiornale RAI (afterwards renamed TG1).
During the 1970s and 1980s, he undertook several controversial and ground-breaking projects, mainly as a foreign correspondent for RAI, interviewing many soon-to-be-influential personalities of the decades (for example, Vespa interviewed then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyła in 1977, a full year before his election to the pontificate).

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Carlo Cassola
Carlo Cassola (17 March 1917–29 January 1987) was an important Italian novelist and essayist. His novel La Ragazza di Bube (1960), which received the Strega Prize, was adapted into a film (named the same as the novel) by Luigi Comencini in 1963.
From the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC:
"Carlo Cassola, Author Of Novels and Stories". New York Times: p. B8. 1987-01-30.

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Carlo Maria Martini
Carlo Maria Martini, SJ (born 15 February 1927) is an Italian Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was Archbishop of Milan from 1980 to 2002, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983.
Carlo Maria Martini was born in Turin, Piedmont, to Leonardo an engineer and Olga (née Maggia) Martini, and was baptized on the following February 22. He was educated at Istituto Sociale, a school run by Jesuits in Turin. He entered the Society of Jesus on September 25, 1944, and was ordained to the priesthood by Cardinal Maurilio Fossati on July 13, 1952. Martini completed his studies in philosophy at the Jesuits House of Studies in Gallarate, in the province of Milan, and theology at the faculty of theology in Chieri. In 1958, Cardinal Martini was awarded his Doctorate in Fundamental Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, with a thesis exploring the problems of the Resurrection accounts. After some years of teaching at the faculty of Chieri he returned to Rome and earned another doctorate in Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, graduating summa cum laude, with a thesis on a group of codici of the Gospel of St. Luke.

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Carmen Covito
Carmen Covito (born 14 November 1948 in Castellammare di Stabia, Province of Naples) is an Italian writer and translator. Her novels include La bruttina stagionata (Bompiani 1992, translated into Spanish, German, French, Dutch, and Greek), Del perché i porcospini attraversano la strada (Bompiani 1995), Benvenuti in questo ambiente (Bompiani 1997) and La rossa e il nero (Mondadori 2002).

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Cees Nooteboom
Cees Nooteboom (born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom, 31 July 1933, in the Hague) is a Dutch author. He has won numerous literary awards and has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Nooteboom was born in The Hague, where his father was killed in a bombing in 1945. After his mother remarried in 1948, and thanks to his strict Catholic stepfather, Nooteboom attended several religious secondary schools, including a Franciscan school in Venray and a school run by the Augustinians in Eindhoven. He finished his secondary education at a nightschool in Utrecht.
After his first job with a bank in Hilversum, Nooteboom traveled throughout Europe. In addition to his writing, he has worked for the political weekly Elsevier from 1957–1960 and at the newspaper de Volkskrant from 1961-1968. In 1967, he became the travel editor for the magazine Avenue.
Nooteboom hired on as a sailor on a freighter to Surinam in 1957 in order to ask for the hand of his first wife, Fanny Lichtveld. They divorced in 1964. Some of his experiences are recounted in the book De verliefde gevangene (1958). He was also in a relationship with the singer, Liesbeth List. Currently he is married to Simone Sassen and divides his time between Amsterdam and the island of Minorca.

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Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃeːzaɾe paˈveːze]) (9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.
Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style was devoid of all rhetoric.
As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public.

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Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (French: [ʃaʁl bodlɛʁ]; April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of 'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

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Chinghiz Aitmatov
Chyngyz Aitmatov (Kyrgyz: Чыңгыз Айтматов [tʃɯŋˈʁɯs ɑjtˈmɑtəf]; Russian: Чинги́з Тореку́лович Айтма́тов) (12 December 1928, Sheker, Kirghiz ASSR, USSR - 10 June 2008, Nuremberg, Germany) was a Soviet and Kyrgyz author who wrote in both Russian and Kyrgyz. He is the best known figure in Kyrgyzstan's literature.
He was born to a Kyrgyz father and Tatar mother. Aitmatov's parents were civil servants in Sheker. In 1937 his father was charged with "bourgeois nationalism" in Moscow, arrested and executed in 1938.
Aitmatov lived at a time when Kyrgyzstan was being transformed from one of the most remote lands of the Russian Empire to a republic of the USSR. The future author studied at a Soviet school in Sheker. He also worked from an early age. At fourteen he was an assistant to the Secretary at the Village Soviet. He later held jobs as a tax collector, a loader, an engineer's assistant and continued with many other types of work.
In 1946 he began studying at the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later switched to literary studies at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. For the next eight years he worked for Pravda. His first two publications appeared in 1952 in Russian: "The Newspaper Boy Dziuio" and "Ашым." His first work published in Kyrgyz was "Ак Жаан" (White rain, 1954), and his well-known work "Jamilya" (Jamila) appeared in 1958. 1980 saw his first novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years; his next significant novel, The Scaffold was published in 1988. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years and other writings were translated into several languages. In 1994, he was a member of the jury at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival.

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Christa Wolf
Christa Wolf (née Ihlenfeld; 18 March 1929, Landsberg an der Warthe – 1 December 2011, Berlin) was a German literary critic, novelist, and essayist. She was one of the best-known writers to have emerged from the former East Germany.
Wolf was born in Landsberg an der Warthe in the Province of Brandenburg; the city is now Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland. After World War II, Wolf and her family, being Germans, were expelled from their home on what had become Polish territory. They crossed the new Oder-Neisse border in 1945 and settled in Mecklenburg, in what would become the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. She studied literature at the University of Jena and the University of Leipzig. After her graduation, she worked for the German Writers' Union and became an editor for a publishing company.
She joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1949 and left it in June 1989. She was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the SED from 1963 to 1967. Stasi records found in 1993 showed that she worked as an informant (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) during the years 1959–61. The Stasi officers criticized what they called her "reticence", and they lost interest in her cooperation. She was herself then closely watched for nearly 30 years. During the Cold War, Wolf was openly critical of the leadership of the GDR, but she maintained a loyalty to the values of socialism and opposed German reunification.

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Christian Slater
Christian Michael Leonard Slater (born August 18, 1969) is an American actor. He made his film debut with a small role in The Postman Always Rings Twice before playing a leading role in the 1985 film The Legend of Billie Jean. He then played a monk's apprentice alongside Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose before gaining recognition for his breakthrough role in the cult film Heathers and Pump Up the Volume.
In the 1990s, Slater featured in many big budget films including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, Broken Arrow, and Hard Rain. He was also featured in the cult film True Romance. Since 2000, Slater has combined work in the film business with television, including appearances in The West Wing and Alias and starring in Breaking In.
Slater was married to Ryan Haddon between 2000 and 2005; they had two children together. Slater has had widely publicized brushes with the law, including being sentenced to three months in jail for assault in 1997.

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Christoph Hein
Christoph Hein (born 8 April 1944) is a German author and translator. He grew up in the village Bad Düben near Leipzig. Being a clergyman's son and thus not allowed to attend the Erweiterte Oberschule, he received secondary education at a gymnasium in the western part of Berlin. After his Abitur he jobbed inter alia as assembler, bookseller and assistant director. From 1967 to 1971 Hein studied philosophy in Leipzig and Berlin. Upon graduation he became dramatic adviser at the Volksbühne in Berlin, where he worked a resident writer from 1974. Since 1979 Hein has worked as a freelance writer.
Hein first became known for his 1982 novella Der fremde Freund (The Distant Lover). From 1998 to 2000 Hein was the first president of the pan-German PEN-Centre.

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Claude Zilberberg
Claude Zilberberg, Docteur d'État, was born in France in 1938. He is co-director of the Paris Intersemiotic Seminar.
For more than 20 years, Claude Zilberberg has been analysing the effects of applying tensive modelling (which he introduced, with Fontanille) as an overlay onto the foundation of Greimasian semiotic theory.

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Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris (b. April 10, 1939, Trieste) is an Italian scholar, translator and writer.
Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978.
He is an essayist and columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and for other European journals and newspapers.
His numerous studies have helped to promote an awareness in Italy of Central European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth.
Magris is a member of several European academies and served as senator in the Italian Senate from 1994 to 1996.
His first book on the Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature rediscovered central European literature. His journalistic writings have been collected in Dietro le parole ("Behind Words", 1978) and Itaca e oltre ("Ithaca and Beyond", 1982). He has written essays on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. His novels and theatre productions, many translated into several languages, include Illazioni su una sciabola (1984),Danubio (1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), and Microcosmi (1997). His breakthrough was Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book (said by the author to be an "drowned novel"), Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history.

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Cornelius Ryan
Cornelius Ryan, (5 June 1920 – 23 November 1974) was an Irish journalist and author mainly known for his writings on popular military history, especially his World War II books: The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 D-Day (1959), The Last Battle (1966), and A Bridge Too Far (1974).
Ryan was born in Dublin and educated at Synge Street CBS, Portobello. He was an altar boy at St. Kevin's Church, Harrington Street and studied the violin at the Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. Ryan moved to London in 1940, and became a war correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in 1941.
He initially covered the air war in Europe, flew along on fourteen bombing missions with the Eighth and Ninth United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), and then joined General George S. Patton's Third Army and covered its actions until the end of the European war. He transferred to the Pacific theater in 1945, and then to Jerusalem in 1946.
Ryan emigrated to the United States in 1947 to work for TIME, where he reported on the postwar tests of atomic weapons carried out by the United States in the Pacific. He then reported for TIME on the Israeli war in 1948. This was followed by work for other magazines, including Collier's Weekly and Reader's Digest.

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Corrado Alvaro
Corrado Alvaro (San Luca, 15 April 1895 – Rome, 11 June 1956) was an Italian journalist and writer of novels, short stories, screenplays and plays. He often used the verismo style to describes the hopeless poverty in his native Calabria. His first success was Gente in Aspromonte (Revolt in Aspromonte), which examined the exploitation of rural peasants by greedy landowners in Calabria, and is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece.
He was born in San Luca, a small village in the southernmost region of Calabria. His father Antonio was a primary school teacher and founded an evening school for farmers and illiterate shepherds. Alvaro was educated at Jesuit boarding schools in Rome and Umbria. He graduated with a degree in literature in 1919 at the University of Milan and began working as a journalist and literary critic for two daily newspapers, Il Resto di Carlino of Bologna and the Corriere della Sera of Milan.
He served as an officer in the Italian army during World War I. After being wounded in both arms, he spend a long time in military hospitals. After the war he worked as a correspondent in Paris (France) for the anti-Fascist paper Il Mondo of Giovanni Amendola. In 1925, he supported the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals written by the philosopher Benedetto Croce.

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Dacia Maraini
Dacia Maraini (born November 13, 1936 in Fiesole) is an Italian writer. She is the daughter of Sicilian Princess Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, an artist and art dealer, and of Fosco Maraini, a Florentine ethnologist and mountaineer of mixed Ticinese, English and Polish background who wrote in particular on Tibet and Japan. Maraini's work focuses on women’s issues, and she has written numerous plays and novels. She has won awards for her work, including the Formentor Prize forL'età del malessere (1963); the Premio Fregene for Isolina (1985); the Premio Campiello and Book of the Year Award for La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990); and the Premio Strega for Buio (1999).
Maraini was born in Fiesole, Tuscany.
When she was a child, her family moved to Japan in 1938 to escape Fascism. They were interned in a Japanese concentration camp from 1943 to 1946 for refusing to recognize the military government. After the war, the family returned to Italy and lived in Sicily with her mother’s family in the town of Bagheria, province of Palermo.

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Dino Buzzati
Dino Buzzati-Traverso (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdino butˈtsati]; 16 October 1906 – 28 January 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe.
Buzzati was born at San Pellegrino, Belluno, in his family's ancestral villa. Buzzati's mother, a veterinarian by profession, was Venetian and his father, a professor of international law, was from an ancient Bellunese family. Buzzati was the second of his parents' four children. In 1924, he enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Milan, where his father once taught. As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death. He began in the corrections department, and later worked as a reporter, special correspondent, essayist, editor and art critic. It is often said that his journalistic background informs his writing, lending even the most fantastic tales an aura of realism.

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Domenico Starnone
Domenico Starnone (born 1943) is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist.
Born in Saviano, near Naples, he collaborated to several newspapapers and satirically magazines, including L'Unità, Il Manifesto, Tango and Cuore, usually about episodes of life as his High School teacher. He works also as screenwriter.
The movies La scuola (by Daniele Luchetti) and Denti (by Gabriele Salvatores) are inspired to his books.
His most appreciated book is Via Gemito, which won the Premio Strega in 2001. It has been recently suggested that the mysterious writer Elena Ferrante, author of L'amore molesto and I giorni dell'abbandono, was Starnone himself.

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Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return .

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Dubravka Ugrešić
Dubravka Ugrešić pronounced [dǔbraːʋka ǔɡreʃitɕ] (born 27 March 1949) is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands.
Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia. Her mother is a Bulgarian from Burgas who emigrated to Yugoslavia at age 19, in the wake of World War II. Ugrešić studied Comparative Literature and Russian Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar of the humanities and as a writer, and continued to work there in the Institute for Theory of Research on Literature for twenty years. She later moved to Amsterdam to write. She has spent time teaching at some European and American universities, including UNC Chapel Hill, UCLA, and Harvard. Currently, she lives in Amsterdam where she is a freelance writer and contributor to some European newspapers and literary journals.
Ugrešić has written on a variety of topics from nature to the question of identity and exile. At first she wrote children's books including «Mali Plamen» (1971) and «Filip I screca» (1976). Another of her early works, «Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota» (1981) is included in her postmodern poetic category of writings. «U raljama zivota» was immediately popular and soon adapted into a film for which Ugrešić wrote the screenplay. Her best-known novel in former Yugoslavia was Štefica Cvek u raljama života (Steffie in the Jaws of Life), an ironic postmodernist novel freely playing with clichés and stereotypes of trivial literature and culture. It follows a young typist named Steffie Speck, whose name was taken from a Dear Abby column, as she searches for love, both parodying and being compelled by the kitschy elements of romance. Ugrešić called the novel her "biggest literary achievement... because of the way in which the hero of the novel defeats its author." The novel was an immediate success^{[citation needed]} and made into a 1984 movie U raljama života directed by Rajko Grlić.

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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

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Eero Tarasti
Eero Aarne Pekka Tarasti (born Helsinki, September 27, 1948) is a Finnish musicologist and semiotician, currently serving as Professor of Musicology at the University of Helsinki.
He received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Helsinki in 1978, writing his dissertation Myth and Music on Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius, and Igor Stravinsky. Then, Tarasti served at the University of Jyväskylä between 1979–1984, where he was appointed Professor of Arts Education in 1979 and Professor of Musicology in 1983. In 1984 he took the position of Professor of Musicology in Helsinki, succeeding Erik Tawaststjerna. Tarasti has held posts as Director or President in several semiotic and musical societies and since the 1970s has written and edited numerous books encompassing a semiotic approach to music. He is the President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (2004–current).

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Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is an American author of fiction.
She was born in Portland, Maine, and was raised in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. Her father was a science professor, and her mother taught high school. After graduating from Bates College, she spent a year in Oxford, England, followed by studies at law school for another year. In 1982 she graduated with honors, and received both a law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law and a Certificate of Gerontology from the Syracuse School of Social Work. That year her first story was published in New Letters magazine.
Strout moved to New York City, and continued to write stories that were published in literary magazines, as well as in Redbook and Seventeen. It took her six or seven years to write Amy and Isabelle, which when published was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.Amy and Isabelle was made into a television movie starring Elisabeth Shue and was produced by Oprah Winfrey's studio, Harpo Films. She was a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) professor at Colgate University during the Fall Semester of 2007, where she taught creative writing at both the introductory and advanced level. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Elsa Morante
Elsa Morante (18 August 1912 – 25 November 1985) was an Italian novelist, perhaps best known for her novel La storia (History).
Elsa Morante was born in Rome in 1912, and except for a period during World War II, would reside in her home city until her death in 1985.
She married the novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941, and through him she met many of the leading Italian thinkers and writers of the day.
Morante began writing short stories which appeared in various publications and periodicals, including periodicals for children, in the 1930s. Her first book was a collection of some of the stories, Il Gioco Segreto, published in 1941. It was followed in 1942 by a children's book, La Bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla Trecciolina (rewritten in 1959 as Le straordinarie avventure di Caterina).
Towards the end of World War II, Morante with her husband, novelist and film critic Alberto Moravia, fearful because both were half Jewish, fled to the area around the Ciociara region near Rome, a flight that inspired Morante's "La storia" and Moravia's "La Ciociara" (translated into English as "Two Women" and later made into a film with Sofia Loren). Southern Italy is the backdrop for much of her work. She began translating Katherine Mansfield during this period, as well as working on her first novel—she even risked returning to war-torn Rome to retrieve the manuscript of "Menzogna e sortilegio" and obtain winter clothes.

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Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano (5 March 1910 in Pescara – 20 November 1972 in Rome), was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic. He is best known for his work with Federico Fellini.
Flaiano wrote for Cineillustrato, Oggi, Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera and other prominent Italian newspapers and magazines.
In 1947, he won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (The Short Cut). Set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935–36), the novel tells the story of an Italian officer who accidentally kills an Ethiopian woman and is then ravaged by the awareness of his act. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness. This is one of the few Italian literary works (which has been constantly in print for sixty years) dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa. A movie adaptation with the same title, directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starred by Nicolas Cage, was released in 1989.
In 1971 he suffered a first heart-attack. "All will have to change", he wrote in his notes. He put his many papers in order and published them, although the major part of his memoirs were published posthumously. In November 1972 he began writing various autobiographical pieces for Corriere della Sera. On November 20 of the same year, while at a clinic for a check-up, he suffered a second cardiac arrest. His daughter Lelè, after a long and grave illness, died at age 40 in 1992. His wife Rosetta Rota, sister of composer Nino Rota, died at the end of 2003. The entire family is buried together at the Maccarese Cemetery, near Rome.

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Enzo Biagi
Enzo Biagi (August 9, 1920 – November 6, 2007) was an Italian journalist and writer.
Biagi was born in Lizzano in Belvedere, and began his career as a journalist in Bologna. Active in journalism for six decades and author of some eighty books, Biagi won numerous awards, among which the 1979 Saint Vincent prize and the 1985 Ischia International Journalism Award. In 1987, he won the Premio Bancarella, for his book Il boss è solo, interviewing former Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta, who had turned pentito (state witness). He worked on the Italian national TV channel Rai Uno until 2001.
On May 9, 2001, just two days before the general elections in Italy, during his daily prime time 10-minute TV show Il Fatto, broadcast on Rai Uno, Biagi interviewed the popular actor and director Roberto Benigni, who gave a hilarious talk about Silvio Berlusconi declaring his preference for the other candidate, Francesco Rutelli from the Olive Tree coalition.
Biagi disappeared from TV screens a few months after Berlusconi's declarations in Sofia named also Editto Bulgaro, where the then-Prime Minister accused the popular journalist, together with fellow journalist Michele Santoro and showman/comedian Daniele Luttazzi, of having made criminal use of the public television service.

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Enzo Siciliano
Enzo Siciliano (May 27, 1934 – June 9, 2006) was an Italian writer, playwright, literary critic and intellectual.
Siciliano was born in Rome. He was collaborator of Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante and many other famous writers in the 1950s and 1960s.
From 1996 to 1998 he was President of RAI (Italian State Television). He died in 2006, aged 72, from complications of diabetes.

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Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.

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Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco (born Eugen Ionescu, Romanian pronunciation: [e.uˈd͡ʒen i.oˈnesku]; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.
Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father of the Orthodox religion and a mother of French and Greek-Romanian heritage, whose religion was Protestant (the religion into which her father was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox mother had converted). Eugène himself was baptized into the Romanian Orthodox religion. Many sources cite his birthdate as 1912, this error being due to vanity on the part of Ionesco himself.

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Fausta Cialente
Fausta Terni Cialente (1898-1994) was an Italian novelist and journalist.
Born in Cagliari, Fausta Cialente's early life was marked by upheaval as the family followed the movements of her father, an army officer. Marrying the composer Enrico Terni in 1921, she settled in Alexandria, Egypt until the end of World War Two. From 1940 she wrote antifascist pamphlets and made daily broadcasts from Radio Cairo against the Fascist regime in Italy. In 1947 she returned to Italy, living there until moving to England in 1984.
Though her first novel Natalia won the Dieci Savi Prize, the book (treating the lesbian relationship of an unhappily married woman) was suppressed by the Fascists. Many of Cialente's subsequent stories were set in Egypt. "The position of her female characters precoccupies Cialente throughout her work, not least in the semi-autobiographical Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger", which won the Strega Prize.

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Ferdinando Camon
Ferdinando Camon (born in Montagnana 1935) is a contemporary Italian writer. He is married to a journalist and has two sons: Alessandro Camon, a film producer/writer who lives in Los Angeles, and Alberto, who teaches criminal procedure and lives in Bologna. He has contributed to a number of Italian and foreign daily newspapers, including La Stampa, l'Unità, Avvenire, Le Monde and La Nación.
Perhaps Camon's best known work in English is his trilogy of fictional memoirs consisting of The Fifth Estate (Il Quinto Stato), Life Everlasting (La Vita Eterna), and Memorial (Un altare per la madre).

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Frank Schätzing
Frank Schätzing (help·info) (born May 28, 1957 in Cologne), is a German writer, mostly known for his best-selling science fiction novel The Swarm (2004).
Schätzing was born in Cologne and studied communication studies; he later ran his own company, an advertising agency named INTEVI, in Cologne. Schätzing became a writer in 1990, and penned several novellas and satires. His first published novel was the historical Tod und Teufel in 1995, and in 2000 his thriller Lautlos.
Schätzing achieved his greatest success in 2004 with the science fiction thriller The Swarm.

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Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈkafka]; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-language author of novels and short stories. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.
Kafka was born to middle class, German-speaking, Jewish parents, in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.
Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague (now the Czech Republic). His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (German pronunciation: [ˈfriːdrɪç ˈdʏrənˌmat] (5 January 1921 – 14 December 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre^{[citation needed]} whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten.
Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather, Ulrich Dürrenmatt, was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began studies in philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943, he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945–46, he wrote his first play It is Written. On 11 October 1946, he married the actress Lotti Geissler. She died on 16 January 1983, and Dürrenmatt married again in 1984 to another actress, Charlotte Kerr.

wn.com/Friedrich_Dürrenmatt
Fulvio Tomizza
Fulvio Tomizza (January 26, 1935 - May 21, 1999) was an Italian language writer. He was born in Giurizzani in Kingdom of Italy (now in Croatia).
In 1955 Tomizza moved to Trieste and his career as a writer took place there. Although he did write a trilogy about his native Istria.

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Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari Pronunciation (help·info) (April 30, 1930 – August 29, 1992) was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of north-west Paris, France. He trained under (and was analysed by) the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s. Subsequently, he worked (until his death from a heart attack in 1992) at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde under the direction of Lacan's pupil, the psychiatrist Jean Oury. La Borde was a venue for conversation among many students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and social work.
One particularly novel orientation developed at La Borde consisted of the suspension of the classical analyst/analysand pair in favour of an open confrontation in group therapy. In contrast to the Freudian school's individualistic style of analysis, this practice studied the dynamics of several subjects in complex interaction; it led Guattari into a broader philosophical exploration of, and political engagement with, a vast array of intellectual and cultural domains (philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, architecture, etc.).

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Gary Jennings
Gary Jennings (September 20, 1928 – February 13, 1999) was an American author who wrote children's and adult novels. In 1980, after the successful novel Aztec, he specialized in writing adult historical fiction novels.
Born September 20, 1928, in Buena Vista, Virginia, to Glen Edward and Vaughnye May Jennings, Gary Jennings attended little formal school after graduating from Eastside High School (of Lean on Me fame) in Paterson, New Jersey, and was mostly self-educated thereafter.
His novels were known for their historical detail and occasionally graphic content. Jennings' novels are well-researched: he lived for 12 years in Mexico to research the Aztec novels, traveled the Balkans while researching Raptor, and joined nine circus troupes during the writing of Spangle. He also produced a number of novels for younger readers, such as A Rope in the Jungle and a history of the occult Black Magic, White Magic.
Gary Jennings died in February 1999 in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, aged 70, from heart failure.

wn.com/Gary_Jennings
Gesualdo Bufalino
Gesualdo Bufalino (Comiso, Italy, 15 November 1920 - 14 June 1996), was an Italian writer.
Gesualdo Bufalino was born in Comiso, Sicily. He studied literature and wasa high-school professor in his hometown, for most of his life. Immediately after World War II, he had to spend some time in an hospital for tuberculosis; hence he drew the material for the novel Diceria dell'untore (The Plague Sower). The book was written in 1950, but was published only in 1981, thanks to Bufalino's friend and well-known writer Leonardo Sciascia who discovered his talents. In 1988, the novel Le menzogne della notte (Night's Lies) won the Strega Prize. In 1990 he won the Nino Martoglio International Book Award. In his native town the Biblioteca di Bufalino ("Bufalino's Library") is now named after him.
Works available in English
Critics works available in Italian

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Gianrico Carofiglio
Gianrico Carofiglio (born 1961) is a novelist and former anti-Mafia judge in the Italian city of Bari. His debut novel, Involuntary Witness, was published in 2002 and translated into English in 2005 by Patrick Creagh and published by the Bitter Lemon Press and has been adapted as the basis for a popular television series in Italy. The subsequent novels were translated by Howard Curtis.
Carofiglio won the 2005 Premio Bancarella award for his novel "Il passato è una terra straniera". He is also Honorary President of The Edinburgh Gadda Prize which celebrates the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda.
The Past is a Foreign Country is the English language title of the 2004 novel Il passato è una terra straniera by Italian author Gianrico Carofiglio. It won the 2005 Premio Bancarella literary award. It has been translated into English.

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Giorgio Bassani
Giorgio Bassani (March 4, 1916 – April 13, 2000) was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.
Bassani was born in Bologna into a prosperous Jewish family of Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico (a doctor), brother Paolo, and sister Jenny. In 1934 he completed his studies at his secondary school, the liceo classico L. Ariosto in Ferrara. Music had been his first great passion and he considered a career as a pianist; however literature soon became the focus of his artistic interests.
In 1935 he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bologna. Commuting to lectures by train (third class) from Ferrara, he studied under the art historian Roberto Longhi. His ideal of the “free intellectual” was the Liberal historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce. Despite the anti-Semitic race laws which were introduced from 1938, he was able to graduate in 1939, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century writer, journalist, radical and lexicographer Niccolò Tommaseo. As a Jew in 1939, however, work opportunities were now limited and he became a schoolteacher in the Jewish School of Ferrara in via Vignatagliata.

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Giorgio Saviane
Giorgio Saviane (16 February 1916 – 18 December 2000) was an Italian author.
Giorgio Saviane received a Laurea in Giurisprudenza from University of Padua and then moved to Florence to practice as a lawyer. During his period in Florence he started his career as a writer. From the very beginning, Saviane adopts an introspective style of writing that will characterize all his future writings.
His best known novels are Eutanasia di un amore and Il mare verticale.

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Giovanni Arpino
Giovanni Arpino (27 January 1927 – 10 December 1987) was an Italian writer and journalist.
Born in Pula (in Istria, then part of Italy) to Piedmontese parents, Arpino moved to Bra in the Province of Cuneo. Here he married Caterina Brero before moving to Turin, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
He graduated in 1951 with a thesis on the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, and the following year made his literary debut with the novel Sei stato felice, Giovanni, published by Einaudi.
He took up sports journalism, writing for the daily papers La Stampa and Il Giornale; together with Gianni Brera at the La Gazzetta dello Sport he brought a new literary quality to Italian writing on sport. His most important work in this line was the 1977 football novel Azzurro tenebra. In Italy he got to know the Argentinian writer, and fellow sports enthusiast, Osvaldo Soriano.
Arpino also wrote plays, short stories, epigrams and stories for children.
He won the Strega Prize in 1964 with L'ombra delle colline, the Premio Campiello of 1972 with Randagio è l'eroe and the 1980 SuperCampiello with Il fratello italiano. His novels are characterised by a dry and ironic style.

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Giovanni Comisso
Giovanni Comisso (October 3, 1895–1969) was an Italian writer.
Born in Treviso, he was an important figure of the Italian literature of the first half of the 20th century. He wrote novels, stories, reportages (for the "Corriere della Sera" and "Gazzetta del Popolo").
Published posthumous
www.italialibri.net/autori/comissog.html

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Giovannino Guareschi
Giovannino Oliviero Giuseppe Guareschi (May 1, 1908 – July 22, 1968) was an Italian journalist, cartoonist and humorist whose most famous creation is the priest Don Camillo.
Giovannino Guareschi was born in Fontanelle di Roccabianca in the Province of Parma into a middle-class family. Guareschi always joked about the fact that he, a large man, was baptized Giovannino, a name meaning "little John" or "Johnny". In 1926 his family went bankrupt, and he could not continue his studies at the University of Parma. After working at various minor jobs, he started to write for a local newspaper, the Gazzetta di Parma. In 1929 he became editor of the satirical magazine Corriere Emiliano, and from 1936 to 1943 he was the chief editor of a similar magazine called Bertoldo.
In 1943 he was drafted into the army, which apparently helped him to avoid trouble with the fascist authorities. He ended up as an artillery officer.
When Italy signed the armistice with Allied troops in 1943, he was arrested and imprisoned in prison camps in German occupied Poland for three years alongside other Italian soldiers. He later wrote about this time in Diario Clandestino (My secret Diary).

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Giulio Andreotti
Giulio Andreotti (Italian pronunciation: [ˈʤuːljo andreˈɔtti]; born January 14, 1919) is an Italian politician of the now dissolved centrist Christian Democracy party. He served as the 42nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1972 to 1973, from 1976 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1992. He also served as Minister of the Interior (1954 and 1978), Defense Minister (1959–1966 and 1974) and Foreign Minister (1983–1989) and he has been a senator for life since 1991. He is also a journalist and author.
He is sometimes called Divo Giulio (from Latin Divus Iulius, "divine Julius", an epithet of Julius Caesar). The movie Il Divo tells about Andreotti's links with the Mafia and won the Prix du Jury at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
Andreotti was born in Rome into a family from Segni. He studied law in Rome, during which time he was member of the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI, or Italian Catholic University Federation), which was then the only Catholic university association allowed by the Fascist government. Its members included many of the future leaders of the Italian Democrazia Cristiana (or DC, the Christian Democracy party). In July 1939, while Aldo Moro was president of FUCI, Andreotti became director of its magazine Azione Fucina. In 1942, when Moro was enrolled in the Italian Army, Andreotti succeeded him as president of FUCI, a position he held until 1944.

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Giuseppe Berto
Giuseppe Berto (27 December 1914 – 1 November 1978) was an Italian writer. He is mostly known for his novels, among which Il cielo è rosso (The Sky Is Red) and Il male oscuro; he also wrote for cinema.

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Giuseppe Pontiggia
Giuseppe Pontiggia (September 25, 1934 - June 27, 2003) was an Italian writer and literary critic.
He was born in Como, and moved to Milan with his family in 1948. In 1959 he graduated from the Università Cattolica in Milan with a thesis on Italo Svevo. After a first unnoticed short story anthology published in 1959, Pontiggia, encouraged by Elio Vittorini, decided to devote himself entirely to writing starting from 1961.
His first novel was L'arte della fuga of 1968. Pontiggia won the Premio Strega in 1989 with La grande sera and the Premio Campiello in 2001 with Nati due volte. He also wrote numerous articles and essays.
He died in Milan in 2003 by a circulatory stroke. He was an atheist.

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Goffredo Parise
Goffredo Parise (Vicenza, 8 December 1929 - Treviso, 31 August 1986) was an Italian writer and journalist. He won the Viareggio Prize in 1965 and the Strega Prize in 1982. He was an atheist.

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Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Antonia Fraser in 1980.

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Helmut Heißenbüttel
Helmut Heißenbüttel (born in Wilhelmshaven, Germany 21 June 1921, died in Glückstadt, Germany 19 September 1996) was a German novelist and poet. Among Heißenbüttel's works are Das Textbuch (The Textbook) and Marlowe's Ende (Marlowe's End). He received the important Georg Büchner Prize in 1969. His other awards include the Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse (1979) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1990). During the second World War he was badly wounded at the Eastern Front so that his left arm had to be amputated. He married Ida Warnholtz in 1954 (one son, three daughters). Heißenbüttel died of pneumonia at a hospital in Glückstadt. His dying words were "wie ein Schokoladen-Milchshake nur knackig."He was 75.

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Ilse Aichinger
Ilse Aichinger (born 1 November 1921) is an Austrian writer noted for her accounts of her persecution by the Nazis because of her Jewish ancestry.
Aichinger was born in 1921 in Vienna, along with her twin sister, Helga, to a Jewish doctor (her mother) and a Christian teacher. Her mother's family was assimilated, and Aichinger was raised a Catholic. She spent her childhood in Linz and Vienna, where her family was subjected to Nazi persecution starting in 1933. Aichinger began to study medicine in 1945, working as a writer on the side. In her first novel, Das vierte Tor (The Fourth Gate), she wrote of her own experience under Nazism.
After studying for five semesters, Aichinger interrupted her studies in medicine again in 1948 in order to finish her second novel, Die größere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope).
In 1953, she married the German writer Günter Eich.
In 1955, Aichinger was awarded the Immermann-Preis by the city of Düsseldorf and in 1956, she joined the Akademie der Künste of Berlin. In 1957, Aichinger won the Literaturpreis der Freien Hansestadt Bremen. In 1963, Aichinger moved to Großgmain, near Salzburg. In 1971, she was awarded the Nelly-Sachs-Preis.

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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

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Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli (April 22, 1909 - July 22, 2001) was an Italian journalist and historian, known for his new approach to writing history in books such as History of the Greeks and History of Rome.
Generally considered one of the greatest Italian journalists of the 20th century, he was among the 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past 50 years named by the International Press Institute in 2000.
Indro Montanelli Bassi was born at Fucecchio, near Florence.
Throughout his career he retained an idiosyncratic and particularly undiplomatic style, even when this made him very unpopular among his peers and employers. This is particularly well illustrated in his book La stecca nel coro (which translates as "Going against the current") which is a list of leading articles he composed between 1974 and 1994 in the newspaper Il Giornale which he founded and directed after being sacked from the very prestigious Corriere della Sera, in October 1973. It was during this experience, in 1977 that the Red Brigade terrorists shot him four times in the legs in the streets of Milan.

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Inger Christensen
Inger Christensen (16 January 1935 – 2 January 2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation.
Born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern, Jutland coast of Denmark, Christensen's father was a tailor, her mother a cook before her marriage. After graduating from Vejle Gymnasium, she moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers’ College there. She received her certificate in 1958. During this same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934–1995), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976.
After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, she turned to writing full time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception. Her most acclaimed work of the 1960s, however, was It (det), which, on one level, explored social, political and aesthetic issues, but more deeply probed large philosophical questions of meaning. The work, almost incantatory in tone, opposes issues such as fear and love and power and powerlessness.

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Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) (Italian pronunciation: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist". In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

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Jacques Fontanille
Jacques Fontanille is a French semiotician who is one of the main exponents of the Paris School of Semiotics.^{[citation needed]} He has authored or co-authored ten books and a number of articles or book chapters whose topics span theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, and semiotics of the visual. A former student and collaborator of the founder of the Paris School of Semiotics, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Fontanille is one of the main continuators of Greimas’ research program as he collaborated with him in his last published works, and assisted him in the administering and organizing of the Inter-Semiotic seminar at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. After Greimas’ death, the course continued under Fontanille’s mantle until it became his own seminar at the Institut Universitaire de France.
Fontanille is Professor and Président (2005–present) at the Université de Limoges in France, where he teaches courses in Linguistics, Semiotics, Stylistics, and Rhetoric. He is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. With Greimas, Fontanille elaborated a semiotics of the passions. With Claude Zilberberg, he developed a tensive semiotics. His most recent books include Sémiotique du discours (2003) translated into English as The Semiotics of Discourse in the Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics Series (2006), and Soma et séma (2004).

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Jacques Le Goff
Jacques Le Goff (born 1 January 1924 in Toulon) is a prolific French historian specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries.
Le Goff champions the Annales School movement, which emphasizes long-term trends over the topics of politics, diplomacy, and war that dominated 19th century historical research. From 1972 to 1977, he was the head of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He was a leading figure of New History, related to cultural history. Le Goff argues that the Middle Ages formed a civilization of its own, distinct from both the Greco-Roman antiquity and the modern world.
A prolific medievalist of international renown, Le Goff is sometimes considered the principal heir and continuator of the movement known as Annales School (École des Annales), founded by his intellectual mentor Marc Bloch. Le Goff succeeded Fernand Braudel in 1972 at the head of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and was succeeded by François Furet in 1977. Along with Pierre Nora, he was one of the leading figure of New History (Nouvelle histoire) in the 1970s.

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Jakob von Uexküll
Jakob Johann von Uexküll (8 September 1864 - 25 July 1944) was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology, animal behaviour studies, and the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok. His works established Biosemiotics as a field of research.
Jakob von Uexküll was born in the Keblas estate, Mihkli, Governorate of Estonia. According to Giorgio Agamben, Uexküll was a baron before his family lost most of their fortune in World War I, although Uexküll managed to retain a villa on Capri where the critic, historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin stayed for some time. Needing to support himself, Uexküll took a job as professor at the University of Hamburg where he founded the Institut für Umweltforschung.
Uexküll was interested in how living beings subjectively perceive their environment(s). Uexküll called these subjective spatio-temporal worlds umwelt (German for environment). These umwelten are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "umgebung" which would be objective reality should such a reality exist.

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James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.
Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

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Javier Marías
Javier Marías (born 20 September 1951, in Madrid) is a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist.
Javier Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julián Marías, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco (the father of the protagonist of Your Face Tomorrow was given a similar biography). Parts of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his father taught at various institutions, including Yale University and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old. Marías's first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesús Franco. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.
Marías began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga", one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, Los dominios del lobo (The Dominions of the Wolf), at ge 17a, after running away to Paris. His second novel, Travesía del horizonte (Voyage Along the Horizon), was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.

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Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ pjaʒɛ]; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. He was the eldest son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss) and Rebecca Jackson (French). His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual."
Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."

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John Deely
John Deely (born April 26, 1942) is an American philosopher and semiotician. He is a Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
His main research concerns the role of semiosis (the action of signs) in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigates the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure (or web) woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) whose elements or terms (representamens, significates and interpretants) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. He was 2006-2007 Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America.
Dr. Deely is married to Maritain scholar Brooke Williams Smith (now Deely). He owns two dogs, named Bruno and Bella.
John Deely first became aware of semiotics as a distinct subject matter during the course of his work on language at the Institute for Philosophical Research as a Senior Research Fellow under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler, through reading Jacques Maritain and John Poinsot, which led to his original contact with Thomas Sebeok in 1968 with a proposal to prepare a critical edition of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (1632) as the earliest full systematization of an inquiry into the being proper to signs. This proposal turned out to require 15 years to complete. Deely and Sebeok became close associates, notably in the 1975 founding of the Semiotic Society of America, in which project Sebeok had Deely function as secretary of the committee drafting the constitution.

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John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. (born February 8, 1955) is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.
John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade. He also served in the House of Representatives in Mississippi from January 1984 to September 1990. He began writing his first novel, A Time To Kill, in 1984, and it was published in June 1989.
As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. A Galaxy British Book Awards winner, Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing, the others being Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.
Grisham's first best seller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel." Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, Skipping Christmas, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and A Time to Kill. His books have been translated into 29 languages and published worldwide.

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Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), known as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈβorxes]), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) (1935). Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.

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Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún Maura (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxorxe semˈpɾun]; 10 December 1923 – 7 June 2011) was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the era of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clandestinely in Spain working as an organizer for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, but was expelled from the party in 1964. After the death of Franco and change to a democratic government, he served as Culture Minister of Spain from 1988 to 1991. He was a screenwriter for two successive films by the Greek director Costa-Gavras, Z (1969) and The Confession (1970), which dealt with the theme of persecution by governments. For his work on Z, Semprun was nominated for an Oscar. In 1996, he became the first non-French author elected to the Académie Goncourt, which awards an annual literary prize.
Jorge Semprún Maura was born in 1923 in Madrid. His mother was Susana Maura Gamazo, a daughter of Antonio Maura, who served several times as prime minister of Spain. His father José María Semprún Gurrea (1893–1966) was a liberal politician and governor in the Republic of Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

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Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923, Berlin - 5 March 2008, Ludwigsfelde-Gröben near Berlin) was a German-American author and professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.
Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in January 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the U.S., but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Weizenbaum returned to earn his M.S. in Mathematics.
Around 1952 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University. In 1956 he worked for General Electric on ERMA, a computer system that introduced the use of the magnetically-encoded fonts imprinted on the bottom border of checks, allowing automated check processing via Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR). In 1964 he took a position at MIT.
In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA, named after the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which performed natural language processing. Driven by a script named DOCTOR, it was capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathic psychologist. Weizenbaum modeled its conversational style after Carl Rogers, who introduced the use of open-ended questions to encourage patients to communicate more effectively with therapists. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human's statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) It is considered the forerunner of thinking machines. Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence and later became one of its leading critics.

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Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarder /ˈju:staɪn ˈgɔːrdər/ (born 8 August 1952 in Oslo) is a Norwegian intellectual and author of several novels, short stories and children's books. Gaarder often writes from the perspective of children, exploring their sense of wonder about the world. He often uses metafiction in his works, writing stories within stories.
Gaarder was born into a pedagogical family. His best known work is the novel Sophie's World, subtitled A Novel about the History of Philosophy. This popular work has been translated into fifty-three languages; there are over thirty million copies in print.
In 1997, he established the Sophie Prize together with his wife Siri Dannevig. This prize is an international environment and development prize (USD 100,000 = 77,000 €), awarded annually. It is named after the novel.
Jostein Gaarder has been involved in the promotion of human rights and sustainable development for several years, establishing the Sophie Prize in 1997.
He has also vehemently criticized the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the treatment of the Palestinians. In August 2006, Jostein Gaarder published an op-ed in one of the major daily newspapers in Norway, Aftenposten. This was written in response to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict and condemned certain aspects of Israeli politics and Judaism. Gaarder also argued against recognizing the state of Israel in its current form. The article described Judaism as "an archaic national and warlike religion", contrasting it with the Christian idea that the "Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness". The op-ed resulted in the Jostein Gaarder controversy. Gaarder disputed allegations of anti-Semitism and sought to clarify that he did not mean to offend anyone. He stated that the piece was written in a state of moral outrage over the death toll in Lebanon.

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Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева) (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Gérard Genette, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.
She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

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Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is a contemporary English writer. Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending, three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (his late wife's surname).
Barnes is one of the best-loved English writers in France, where he has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Flaubert's Parrot and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. He is an officer of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Barnes was born in Leicester although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were teachers of French. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination". As an adolescent he lived in Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metroland' of which he named his first novel. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, saying: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff". From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.

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Jürg Laederach
Jürg Laederach (born 20 December 1945 in Basel, Switzerland) is a Swiss writer.

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Kalevi Kull
Kalevi Kull (born on August 12, 1952) is an eminent biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
He was the president of the Estonian Naturalists' Society in 1991–1994.
Ecologist Olevi Kull was his younger brother.

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Ken Follett
Ken Follett (born 5 June 1949) is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels. He has sold more than 100 million copies of his works. Four of his books have reached the number 1 ranking on the New York Times best-seller list: The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, Triple, and World Without End.
Follett was born on 5 June 1949 in Cardiff, Wales. He was the first child of Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett, who went on to have three more children. Barred from watching movies and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens. His family moved to London when he was ten years old and he began applying himself to his studies at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College, and won admission in 1967 to University College London, where he studied philosophy and became involved in centre-left politics.

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Lalla Romano
Lalla Romano (November 11, 1906 in Demonte – June 26, 2001 in Milan) was an Italian novelist, poet, and journalist.
She came from a noteworthy Piedmontese family, Giuseppe Peano was her great-uncle, and originally had an interest in painting. She continued to paint, gaining some attention with painting, throughout her life. She attended the University of Turin where Cesare Pavese led her to an increased interest in writing. She graduated with a degree in literature than worked as a librarian and teacher. During World War II she joined with the Resistance. After the war she became noted for writings that drew on personal and family experiences.

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Lila Azam Zanganeh
Lila Azam Zanganeh is a writer raised in Paris by exiled Iranian parents, currently living and working in New York. She is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (Norton 2011).
Lila was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University. In 2002, she began contributing literary articles, interviews, and essays to a host of American and European publications, among which The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.
Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, was published in the Spring of 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States, Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, L'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, and L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy. In 2012, it will be published by Duomo Ediciones in Spain, Alfaguara Objetiva in Brazil, and Shang Shu in China.
She is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City, currently at work on a new novel titled The Orlando Inventions.

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Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen – May 30, 1965, Copenhagen) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris (with a.o. Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes). In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism, it is interested only in describing the formal characteristics of language, and a high degree of logical rigour. The theory never became widely influential, but has recently been picked up by post-structuralist philosophers as a possible alternative to the dominant saussurean linguistic paradigm.

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Luciano De Crescenzo
Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian pronunciation: [luˈtʃano de kreʃˈʃɛntso]; born 18 August 1928) is an Italian writer, film actor, director and engineer.
Born in Naples, he graduated in engineering and worked for IBM Italy until 1976, when he published the bestseller Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spoke Bellavista), a collection of facts and anecdotes about his city which sold 600,000 copies in Italy and was translated into numerous languages. In 1980 he debuted as actor in Il pap'occhio, under the direction of his friend Renzo Arbore, together with Roberto Benigni.
In 1984 he directed the successful movie adaptation of Così parlò Bellavista (in which he also played the main protagonist), followed by Il mistero di Bellavista in 1985. In 1995 he wrote and directed Croce e delizia, featuring Teo Teocoli and Isabella Rossellini.
In the meantime he published a long series of books, including novels and popularizations of philosophy. For his work in the field of Greek philosophy he received honorary citizenship of Athens in 1994.

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Luigi Pareyson
Luigi Pareysón (4 February 1918 – 18 September 1991) was an Italian philosopher.
Luigi Pareyson was born on 4 February 1918, in Piasco, in the province of Cuneo. He received his doctorate from the University of Turin in 1939, finishing his degree with a dissertation entitled "Karl Jaspers and the Philosophy of Existence." As a professor at the University of Turin, he had many famous students, including Mario Perniola, Gianni Vattimo, and Umberto Eco. He died in Rapallo, in the province of Genoa, on 18 September 1991.

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Luigi Preti
Luigi Preti (23 October 1914 – 19 January 2009) was an Italian politician and minister of Italian Democratic Socialist Party.
Preti was born in Ferrara. He graduated in law in Bologna and lecturer of public law. He died in Bologna in 2009.
Preti was a member of House after fascism, who wrote new Italian republican Constitution. He was Minister of Finance, for International trade, for Budget, for the Reforms of administration and for Transport. He was also president of his party. He retired from politics in 1987 after 40 years in politics.

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Marcel Danesi
Marcel Danesi (born 1946) is a current Professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is known for his work in language, communications, and semiotics; being Director of the Program in semiotics and communication theory. He has also held positions at Rutgers University (1972), University of Rome "La Sapienza" (1988), the Catholic University of Milan (1990), and the University of Lugano.

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Margaret Mazzantini
Margaret Mazzantini (born 27 October 1961) is an Italian writer and actress. She became a film, television and stage actor, but is best known as a writer. Mazzantini began her acting career in 1980 starring in the cult horror classic Antropophagus, she has also appeared in television and theatre. As a successful writer her novels include Non ti muovere (Don't Move) which was adapted into a film of the same name and is directed by her husband Sergio Castellitto and stars Penélope Cruz. Her career as a writer and actress has earned her several awards and nominations including Campiello Awards, a Golden Ticket Award, and a Goya Award.
Mazzantini was born in Dublin, Ireland to Carlo Mazzantini, an Italian writer and artist, and Anne Donnelly, an Irish artist. She spent her childhood around Europe, Spain, and Tangier, until the family settled in Tivoli. In 1982 she graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome.
She married Sergio Castellitto in 1987. They have four children, Pietro (b. 1992), Maria (b. 1997), Anna (b. 2001) and Cesare (b. 2006). She lives in Rome.

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Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras (pronounced: [maʁ.ɡə.ʁit dy.ʁas]) (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director.
She was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony.
Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her ten children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subsequent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period.

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Maria Bellonci
Maria Villavecchia Bellonci (Rome, 30 November 1902 – 13 May 1986) was an Italian writer known especially for her biography of Lucrezia Borgia. She and Guido Alberti set up the Strega Prize in 1947.

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Mario Soldati
Mario Soldati (17 November 1906 – 19 June 1999) was an Italian writer and film director.
Soldati studied Humanities in his native city, Turin, and History of Art in Rome. He started publishing novels in 1929 although his fame came with America primo amore, published in 1935, a diary about the time he spent teaching at Columbia University. He won literary awards for the work, most notably the Strega Prize for Lettere da Capri in 1954.
He began directing in 1938 and his most famous films are Piccolo mondo antico (1941) and Malombra with Isa Miranda, both based on novels by Antonio Fogazzaro; these two films belong to the early 1940s movement in Italian cinema known as calligrafismo
Other popular films were Eugenie Grandet, based on Balzac's novel, with Alida Valli; Fuga in Francia (1948); The River Girl (starring Sophia Loren) and La provinciale (starring Gina Lollobrigida).
Soldati also wrote for Italian newspapers including Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, Avanti, L'Unita and Il Giorno.

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Mario Tobino
Mario Tobino (January 16, 1910, Viareggio, Province of Lucca – December 11, 1991) was an Italian poet, writer and psychiatrist.
Tobino was born in Viareggio, Tuscany. A prolific writer, he debuted as a poet but later composed mostly novels. His works are characterized by a strong autobiographical inspiration, and usually deals with social and psychological themes.
Tobino died in Agrigento in 1991. He was 81.

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Martin McLaughlin
Martin L. McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. In addition to his published academic results he is the English translator of Umberto Eco's On Literature and Italo Calvino's Hermit in Paris.
McLaughlin's research interests include Italian Renaissance literature, Renaissance humanism, Renaissance literary theory, Renaissance biography, Alberti, Petrarch, Poliziano, Tasso, the classical legacy in Italian literature, contemporary Italian Fiction, Italo Calvino, Andrea De Carlo, and translation studies. He teaches Italian language and literature, especially Dante, Renaissance literature from Petrarch to Tasso, post-war fiction especially Calvino, the Italian short story, and translation studies.

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Massimo Bontempelli
Massimo Bontempelli (May 12, 1878 – July 21, 1960) was an Italian poet, playwright, and novelist. He was influential in developing and promoting the literary style known as magical realism.
Bontempelli graduated from the University of Torino in 1903. He taught elementary school for seven years, doing his writing on the side, but abandoned teaching for journalism when he could not secure a position at a secondary school. He served as a war correspondent during WWI. After the war, he settled in Milan and became interested in the literary styles of futurism and magical realism. In 1926, he, along with Curzio Malaparte, founded the journal "900". James Joyce, Max Jacob, and Rainer Maria Rilke sat on the editorial committee and Virginia Woolf and Blaise Cendrars were among the contributors.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bontempelli was an active fascist. He served as a secretary of the fascist writers' union and spent time abroad lecturing on Italian culture and spreading propaganda. In 1938, he refused to accept a university post formerly held by a Jewish professor and was kicked out of the fascist party. After WWII, Bontempelli won a Senate race but the results were voided when his fascist ties were discovered. In 1953, Bontempelli's "L'amante Fedele" won the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. After years of declining health, Bontempelli died in Rome in 1960.

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Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
Connelly was the second oldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker. According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life. W. Michael Connelly himself was a risk taker who alternated success with failure in his pursuit of a career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels.
At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At age 16, Connelly’s interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly was curious and decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, he brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the investigators’ hard faces and the way they worked.

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Michael Silverstein
Michael Silverstein (born 1945) is a professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he has drawn together research on linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, language ideology, semiotic anthropology and grammatical theory into a comprehensive account of language in culture^{[citation needed]}. Among other achievements, he has been instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with developing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Silverstein earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the Russian linguist, semiotician and literary critic Roman Jakobson, a former member of the Prague School, where he also studied under the logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. In 1982 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the second year of the prize's existence, and was the youngest person, at the time, to be awarded the grant. He was also a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, in Anthropology.

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Mike Bongiorno
Michael Nicholas Salvatore Bongiorno (Italian pronunciation: [bonˈdʒorno]; May 26, 1924 – September 8, 2009), known as Mike Bongiorno, was an American television host who made himself a career in Italy, eventually becoming an Italian citizen without relinquishing his American identity. After a few experiences in the US, he started woking on Italian TV in the 1950s and was considered to be the most popular host in Italy. He was also known by the nickname il Re del Quiz (The Quiz King), and the peculiarity of starting all his shows with his trademark greeting: Allegria! (Cheers!).
Bongiorno was born in New York City, but moved to Turin (his mother's native city), when he was young. His father was a Sicilian American lawyer. During World War II Mike abandoned his studies and joined a group of Italian partisans. He was captured and spent seven months in the San Vittore prison in Milan and was then deported to a German concentration camp. He was liberated before the end of the war due to a prisoners of war exchange between the United States and Germany. He returned to New York and in 1946 started work at the radio headquarters of Il Progresso Italo-Americano (The Italian-American Progress) newspaper.

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Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, pronounced [mʲɪxʌˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ bʌxˈtʲin]) (November 17, 1895, Oryol – March 7, 1975, Moscow) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.
Bakhtin had a difficult life and career, and few of his works were published in an authoritative form during his lifetime. As a result, there is substantial disagreement over matters that are normally taken for granted: in which discipline he worked (was he a philosopher or literary critic?), how to periodize his work, and even which texts he wrote (see below). He is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in a number of disciplines: dialogism, the carnivalesque, the chronotope, heteroglossia and "outsidedness" (the English translation of a Russian term vnenakhodimost, sometimes rendered into English—from French rather than from Russian—as "exotopy"). Together these concepts outline a distinctive philosophy of language and culture that has at its center the claims that all discourse is in essence a dialogical exchange and that this endows all language with a particular ethical or ethico-political force.

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Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (Czech pronunciation: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]); born 1 April 1929) is the Czech Republic's most recognised living writer. Of Czech origin, he has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981. Having written in both Czech and French, he revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works.
Kundera is best known as the author of works such as The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.

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Moussa Sow
Moussa Sow (born 19 January 1986) is a French-born Senegalese football player who currently plays for Fenerbahçe in Turkey.
In his first couple of seasons, Sow has made his mark mostly in cup competitions, scoring a brace for Stade Rennes against USC Corte on 6 January 2006 in the Coupe de France and one in an away game against Lille in the Coupe de la Ligue.
After his contract with Rennes came to an end, the 24-year-old forward signed a three year deal with Lille OSC on 28 June 2010. Sow scored on his debut for Lille in a 1–1 draw away to his former club Rennes. He did not score again in the league until a 90th minute goal on 19 September gave Lille all three points in a tough home contest against Auxerre.
Sow scored his first hat-trick for Lille on 13 November 2010, the goals came in a 5-2 away victory to Caen, with both Gervinho and Franck Beria grabbing 90th minute goals to seal the win. Less than a month later on 5 December, Sow netted another hat-trick this time against Lorient. His goals helped Lille to a 6-3 win and firmly placed his side into contention for the Ligue 1 crown. Lille went into the winter break in sole position of first place, as Sow fired in their only goal in a 1-1 draw with Saint Étienne on 22 December.

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Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg née Levi (Italian pronunciation: [nataˈliːa ˈɡintsburɡ]; 14 July 1916, Palermo — 7 October 1991, Rome) was an award-winning Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States.
Born in Palermo, Sicily, Natalia Levi spent most of her youth in Turin with her family; her father took a position with the University of Turin in 1919. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents raised Natalia and her two brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 Natalia published her first story, I Bambini, in 1933 in the magazine Solaria.

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Niccolò Ammaniti
Niccolò Ammaniti (born September 25, 1966 in Rome) is an Italian writer. As a young Italian novelist, Ammaniti was part of the cannibalistic group, from the anthology Gioventù Cannibale by Daniele Brolli (1996), for which he wrote a short novel together with Ricardo Shorts.
He became noted in 2001 with the publication of Io non ho paura, a novel which was later made into a movie directed by Gabriele Salvatores.
In 2006, he published Come Dio comanda,^{[dead link]} a novel where nothing should be taken at face value. A crime novel, which is also a weariless dialogue between man and God. A profound view of Italy of the underclass and unemployed where poverty and dreams, nobility and cruelty, humor and sadness are interwoven to the spectacular notion of life itself. Translated by Brian Woods of Camden New Jersey.^{[citation needed]}
The three books which have been released in the English language and have been translated by Jonathan Hunt are I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura), Steal You Away (Ti prendo e ti porto via) and The Crossroads (Come Dio comanda).

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Niketas Choniates
Nicetas or Niketas Choniates (Νικήτας Χωνιάτης, ca. 1155 to 1215 or 1216), sometimes called Acominatos, was a Greek historian – like his brother Michael Acominatus, whom he accompanied from their birthplace Chonae to Constantinople. Nicetas wrote a history of the Eastern Roman Empire from 1118 to 1207.
Nicetas Acominatos was born to wealthy parents around or after 1150 in Phrygia in the city of Chonae (near the modern Honaz in Turkey). Bishop Nicetas of Chonae baptized and named the infant; later he was called "Choniates" after his birthplace. When he was nine, his father dispatched him with his brother Michael to Constantinople to receive an education. Niketas' older brother greatly influenced him during the early stages of his life. He initially took up politics as a career, and held important appointments under the Angelus emperors (amongst them that of Grand Logothete or Chancellor) and was governor of the theme of Philippopolis at a critical period. After the capture of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, he fled to Nicaea, where he settled at the court of the Nicaean emperor Theodore I Lascaris, and devoted himself to literature. He died c. 1215–16.

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Oriana Fallaci
Oriana Fallaci (Italian pronunciation: [oˈrjana falˈlatʃi]; 29 June 1929 – 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her interviews with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
After retirement, she returned to the spotlight after writing a series of articles and books critical of Islam that aroused support as well as controversy.
Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy, in 1929. Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. During World War II, she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà". She later received a certificate for valour from the Italian army. In a 1976 retrospective collection of her works, she remarked that:

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Paolo Fabbri
Paolo Fabbri is an Italian musicologist and academic. In 1989 he was awarded the Dent Medal. He is best known for his extensive publications on the life and works of Gioachino Rossini, and for a biography of composer Claudio Monteverdi which was first published in the Italian language in Turin in 1985 but later published by Cambridge University Press using an English language translation by Tim Carter in 1994. He is also the author of Il secolo cantante: Per una storia del libretto d'opera nel Seicento (Bologna, 1990). For many years he has been a Professor of Music History and Musical Aesthetics at the University of Ferrara. He is the current director of the Fondazione Donizetti library in Bergamo.

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Paolo Giordano
Paolo Giordano (born 1982) is an Italian writer who won the Premio Strega literary award with his first novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers.
Paolo Giordano was born in Turin. He is a professional physicist and is currently working on a doctorate in particle physics. The Solitude of Prime Numbers, his first novel, has sold over a million copies. It is was translated into thirty languages.
The Italian language film based on the novel was released in September 2010.

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Paolo Volponi
Paolo Volponi (1924–1994) was an Italian writer and poet.
He was an atheist.

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Paul Nizon
Paul Nizon (born December 19, 1929 in Bern) is a Swiss art historian and writer.
The son of a Russian chemist and a Swiss mother, after leaving school he studied history of art, classical archaeology and German language and literature in the universities of Berne and Munich. He obtained his doctorate in 1957 with a thesis on Vincent van Gogh. Until 1959 he worked as a scientific assistant at the Historisches Museum in Berne. In 1960 he was awarded a scholarship at the Swiss Institute in Rome. In 1961 he was a leading art critic of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Since 1962 Nizon, who has lived in Paris since 1977, has been a freelance writer. He has held various guest lectureships, including in 1984 in the University of Frankfurt am Main and 1987 in Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

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Pavel Kohout
Pavel Kohout (born July 20, 1928, Prague) is a Czech and Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a Prague Spring exponent and dissident in 1970s until he was expelled to Austria. He was a founding member of the Charter 77 movement.
Because he and other dissident theatre workers had been banned from working in the official theatre, he formed the company Living-Room Theatre with the actors Pavel Landovský, Vlasta Chramostová, Vlastimil Třešňák, and his daughter, Tereza Boučková to covertly perform an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth in living rooms in Prague. Czech-born UK playwright Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth is inspired by these events.
His most notable play is the drama Poor Murderer, that opened on Broadway in Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1976. It is based on the short story "Thought" by Leonid Andreyev.
His novels include White Book (an absurdist picture of life under Communism), I Am Snowing (a post-Communism story about the opening of the Communist-era secret police informer files, the effect of that opening on the informers and their victims, and thus about the corrosive effect of the Communist regime), The Widow Killer (a detective story set in World War II Nazi-occupied Prague), and The Hangwoman (a black-humor story about executioners).

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Per Olov Enquist
Per Olov Enquist, better known as P. O. Enquist, (born 23 September 1934 in Hjoggböle, Skellefteå, Västerbotten) is a Swedish author. He has worked as a journalist, playwright and novelist. In the nineties, he gained international recognition with his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician.
After a degree in history of literature at Uppsala University he worked as a newspaper columnist and TV debate moderator from 1965 to 1976. Because of his work he soon became an influential figure on the Swedish literary scene. From 1970 to 1971 Enquist lived in Berlin on a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and in 1973 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been working as an independent writer since 1977.
Enquist's works are characterized by a chronic pessimistic view of the world. They always describe the restrictions imposed by the pietistical way of living, especially in March of the Musicians (1978) and Lewi's Journey (2001). He gained international recognition with his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician (1999) where he tells the story of Johann Friedrich Struensee, the personal physician of the Danish King Christian VII.

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Peter Huchel
Peter Huchel (April 3, 1903 – April 30, 1981), born Hellmut Huchel, was a German poet.
Huchel was born in Lichterfelde near Berlin. From 1923 to 1926 Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg and Vienna. Between 1927 and 1930 he travelled to France, Romania, Hungary and Turkey. In 1930, he changed his first name to Peter and befriended Ernst Bloch, Alfred Kantorowicz and Fritz Sternberg. His early poems, published from 1931 to 1936, are strongly marked by the atmosphere and landscape of Brandenburg. In 1934, Huchel married Dora Lassel. The couple would divorce in 1946 and Huchel would marry Monica Rosental in 1953. Between 1934 and 1940, Huchel wrote plays for German radio. During the Second World War, he served as a soldier until he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945. After his release, he began working for East German radio and in 1949, he became editor of the influential poetry magazine Sinn und Form ("Sense and Form"). After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel came under attack from the East German authorities and the following year he was forced to resign the editorshop of Sinn und Form. From 1962 to 1971, he lived in isolation under Stasi (secret service) surveillance in his house in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. In 1971, he was finally permitted to leave the German Democratic Republic and move, first to Rome, then to Staufen im Breisgau, where he later died.

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Petr Vopěnka
Petr Vopěnka (born May 16, 1935 in Prague) is a Czech mathematician. In the early seventies, he established the Alternative Set Theory (i.e. alternative to the classical Cantor theory), which he subsequently developed in a series of articles and monographs. In the sphere of world mathematics literature, Vopěnka’s name is associated with many first-class mathematical achievements. Since the mid-eighties he has concerned himself with philosophical questions of mathematics (particularly vis-à-vis Husserlian phenomenology).
Petr Vopěnka grew up in small town of Dolní Kralovice. After finishing gymnasium in Ledeč nad Sázavou in 1953 he went to study mathematics at the Mathematics and Physics Faculty of Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1958. In 1962 he was made Candidate of Sciences (CSc) and in 1967 Doctor of Science (DrSc). His advisors were Eduard Čech and Ladislav Rieger.
Starting in 1958 Vopěnka taught at the Mathematics and Physics Faculty, since 1964 as lecturer, since 1965 as senior lecturer. In 1968 he was made professor but was prevented to take this title until 1990 due to political reasons. Between 1966 and 69 Vopěnka served as Vice Dean of the faculty.

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Philip Zimbardo
Philip George Zimbardo (born March 23, 1933) is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is president of the Heroic Imagination Project. He is known for his Stanford prison study and authorship of various introductory psychology books and textbooks for college students, including The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox.
Zimbardo was born in New York City on March 23, 1933, from a family of Sicilian immigrants. He completed his BA with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1954, where he graduated summa cum laude. He completed his M.S. (1955) and Ph.D (1959) in psychology from Yale University, where Neal E. Miller was his advisor. He taught at Yale from 1959 to 1960. From 1960 to 1967, he was a professor of psychology at New York University. From 1967 to 1968, he taught at Columbia University. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1968.
In 1971, Zimbardo accepted a tenured position as professor of psychology at Stanford University. With a government grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, he conducted the Stanford prison study in which 24 clinically sane individuals were randomly assigned to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford (three additional college students were selected as alternates, only one of whom participated in the study). The planned two-week study into the psychology of prison life ended after only six days due to emotional trauma being experienced by the participants. The students quickly began acting out their roles, with "guards" becoming sadistic and "prisoners" showing extreme passivity and depression.

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Pietro Citati
Pietro Citati (Florence, 1930) is a famous Italian writer and literary critic.
He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.
In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer declare: "'I am like you, I am a man like you, I suffer and rejoice as you do, like a meticulous and buoyant angel, a being who lives far away in a world that did not belong even to him."
From 1973 to 1988, he contributed to the cultural section of Corriere della Sera and has been the literary critic for la Repubblica between 1988 and 2011, before returning to write for Corriere della Sera.

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Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (pronounced [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]; July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975) which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.
Levi was born in Turin at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare was arranged by Rina’s father. On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto where Primo Levi was to live for almost his entire life.

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Péter Nádas
Péter Nádas (born 14 October 1942) is a Hungarian writer, playwright, and essayist.
He was born in Budapest as the son of László Nádas and Klára Tauber. After the takeover of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party on 15 October 1944, Klára Tauber escaped with her son to Bačka and Novi Sad, but returned to the capital directly before the Siege of Budapest. Péter Nádas survived the siege together with his mother in the flat of his uncle, the journalist Pál Aranyossi.
Even though his parents were illegal Communists during World War II and involved with the Communist administration later on, as well, they had both their sons—Péter and Pál—baptized in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church of Pozsonyi Street. His mother died of an illness when he was 13. In 1958, his father—head of department in one of the ministries, slandered with accusations of embezzlement, then exonerated by the court of all charges—committed suicide; Péter Nádas became an orphan at 16. Magda Aranyossi became the guardian of the two children.

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Raffaele La Capria
Raffaele La Capria (born 3 October 1922) is an Italian writer, known especially for the three novels which were collected as Tre romanzi di una giornata.
La Capria was born in Naples, where he was to spend the formative years of his life. There he graduated in law, before staying in France, England and the United States and then settling in Rome. He contributed to the cultural pages of the Corriere della Sera and was co-director of the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti. A particular interest was English poetry of the 1930s: as well as writing numerous articles he translated works including T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In the 1950s he wrote and produced a number of radio programmes for RAI on foreign contemporary drama. In 1957 he was invited to participate in the International Seminar of Literature at Harvard University. In 1961 his novel Ferito a morte won the prestigious Premio Strega.
He worked as co-scriptwriter on a number of Francesco Rosi’s films, including Le mani sulla città (1963), Uomini contro (1970) and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1979). In September 2001 he received a Premio Campiello lifetime achievement award and in 2005 L'estro quotidiano was selected as the winner of the Viareggio Prize for fiction.

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Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich ( /ˈraɪʃ/; born June 24, 1946) is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997.
Reich is currently Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor), Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Reich is a political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of the "Most Influential Business Thinkers". He was appointed a member of President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.

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Roberta Kevelson
Roberta Kevelson (November 4, 1931 – November 28, 1998) was a semiotician and an important authority on the pragmatism theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. She was a professor at Pennsylvania State University and The College of William & Mary, Virginia. Among her published works are High Fives, The Inverted Pyramid, The Law as the System of Signs and, possibly her most significant work, Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon. She was a founding member of the Semiotic Society of America.
Kevelson was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. Although married at 17, she returned to college in the 1960s and received her PhD in semiotics from Brown University in 1978. During her postdoctoral tenure at Yale University (1979-1981), she introduced the concept of legal semiotics.^{[citation needed]} She subsequently established an international crossdisciplanary center for its study in 1984.^{[citation needed]}
Some works by Roberta Kevelson (from the Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography):

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Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) (French pronunciation: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the North Sea before his son was one year old. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, where he earned a license in classical letters. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. It also kept him out of military service during World War II and, while being kept out of the major French universities meant that he had to travel a great deal for teaching positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance of major degree-awarding universities, and did so throughout his career.^{[clarification needed]}

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Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н) (October 10, 1896, Moscow – July 18, 1982, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.
As one of the first of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language). He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, the visual arts, and cinema.

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Ron Perlman
Ronald N. "Ron" Perlman (born April 13, 1950) is an American television, film and voice actor. He is known for having played Vincent in the TV series Beauty and the Beast (for which he won a Golden Globe), a Deathstroke figure known as Slade in the animated series Teen Titans, Clarence "Clay" Morrow in Sons of Anarchy, the comic book character Hellboy in both the film of that name, and the sequel, and as the narrator of the post-apocalyptic game series, Fallout. In 2010 he provided the voice of the Stabbington brothers in Tangled, Disney's animated film adaptation of "Rapunzel". He is currently the narrator of the television series 1000 Ways to Die on Spike.
Perlman was born in Washington Heights, New York to a Jewish family. His mother, Dorothy, was a municipal employee, and his father was a jazz drummer and repairman. Perlman stated in a 1988 interview that "It was not a bad childhood but...I had a perception of myself that was, I was terribly overweight as a young kid, and it was sort of a low self image." Perlman continued to say that this experience is one thing that attracts him to "playing these sorts of deformed people who are very endearing".

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Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a linguist, poet , writer and critic of India.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair received her Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in cognitive linguistics and critical theory. She is a professor of Linguistics and English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She is the author of The Ayodhya Cantos and The Hyoid Bone: Poems. She was mentioned among the "Faces of the Millennium" in Literature by the India Today magazine in 2000.
Her awards and fellowships include J.N. Tata Scholarship, the Hornby Foundation Award and the Dorothy Lee Grant besides winning Poetry prizes of Poetry Society ( India ) etc ...
Books

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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq); /sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

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Sandro Veronesi
Sandro Veronesi, born in Prato, Tuscany in 1959, is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of poetry (Il resto del cielo, 1984) that has remained his only venture into verse writing. What has followed since includes five novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplay, and television programs.
Il resto del cielo consists of twenty-five short compositions, none longer than fourteen verses, that speak to the general problematics of communication, all of which is underscored by a constant coincidentia oppositorum. Seemingly simple verses, they speak eloquently to the narrating voice’s quotidian landscape.
His first novel, Per dove parte questo treno allegro (1988), is the story of a typical relationship of the 1980s between father and son. A troubled rapport between them, the father is an adventurous businessman who, while deep in debt, has squirreled away a few hundred thousand dollars in Switzerland. The son, an insipid thirty-year-old, who acts half his age, is a do-nothing with strange habits. While the two spend a few strained weeks together, their lives eventually begin to find some similarities.

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Sarah Kirsch
Sarah Kirsch (born April 16, 1935) is a German poet.
She was born Ingrid Bernstein in Limlingerode, Prussian Saxony. She changed her first name to Sarah in order to protest against her father's anti-semitism. She studied biology in Halle and literature at the Johannes R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig. In 1965, she married the writer Rainer Kirsch. She protested against East Germany's expulsion of Wolf Biermann in 1976, which led to her exclusion from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). One year later she left the country herself, nevertheless being critical of the west as well. She is mainly known for her poetry, but she also writes prose and has translated children's books into German In 1976 Sarah Kirsch was awarded the German international literary Petrarca-Preis. .

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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".

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Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes ( /ˈʃɜrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/) is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases.
Holmes, who first appeared in publication in 1887, was featured in four novels and 56 short stories. The first novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 and the second, The Sign of the Four, in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. The character grew tremendously in popularity with the first series of short stories in Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891; further series of short stories and two novels published in serial form appeared between then and 1927. The stories cover a period from around 1880 up to 1914.
All but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson; two are narrated by Holmes himself ("The Blanched Soldier" and "The Lion's Mane") and two others are written in the third person ("The Mazarin Stone" and "His Last Bow"). In two stories ("The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Gloria Scott"), Holmes tells Watson the main story from his memories, while Watson becomes the narrator of the frame story. The first and fourth novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, each include a long interval of omniscient narration recounting events unknown to either Holmes or Watson.

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Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʁ]; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, political activist, feminist theorist and social theorist. She did not consider herself a philosopher but her significant contributions to existentialism and feminist existentialism have solidified her legacy as a philosopher and feminist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise (born) Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.

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Stanislao Nievo
Stanislao Nievo (born on 30 June 1928 in Milan, died in 2006 in Roma) was an Italian writer, journalist and director. He won the Strega Prize. He is the little little son of Ippolito Nievo, author of Le confessioni di un italiano.

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Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof (born July 1, 1931 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a psychiatrist, one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of exploring, healing, and obtaining growth and insights into the human psyche. Grof received the VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and Václav Havel in Prague on October 5, 2007.
Grof is known for his early studies of LSD and its effects on the psyche—the field of psychedelic psychotherapy. Building on his observations while conducting LSD research and on Otto Rank's theory of birth trauma, Grof constructed a theoretical framework for pre- and perinatal psychology and transpersonal psychology in which LSD trips and other powerfully emotional experiences were mapped onto a person's early fetal and neonatal experiences. Over time, this theory developed into an in-depth "cartography" of the deep human psyche. Following the legal suppression of LSD use in the late 1960s, Grof went on to discover that many of these states of mind could be explored without drugs by using certain breathing techniques in a supportive environment. He continues this work today under the title "Holotropic Breathwork".

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Stanisław Lem
Stanisław Lem (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] ( listen); 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. He was named a Knight of the Order of the White Eagle. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon said that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and mankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. Multiple translated versions of his works exist.

wn.com/Stanisław_Lem
Susanna Agnelli
Susanna Agnelli, Contessa Rattazzi, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (April 24, 1922 – May 15, 2009) was an Italian politician, businesswoman and writer. She was the only woman to have been Minister of Foreign Affairs in Italy.
Born in Turin, she was the daughter of Edoardo Agnelli and Donna Virginia Bourbon del Monte, a daughter of the Prince di San Faustino and his Kentucky-born wife Jane Campbell. Her brother, Gianni Agnelli, was the head of Fiat until 1996; the Agnelli family is still the controlling shareholders of the company as of 2009. The family also held investments which represented the largest percentage of the Italian stock market.
She was elected to the Italian Parliament in 1976 for the Italian Republican Party (PRI), becoming a senator in 1983. Also for PRI, she was a member of the European Parliament in 1979–1981. She also served as mayor of Monte Argentario in 1974-1984.
In 1945 she married Count Urbano Rattazzi (born 1918) with whom she had six children, the youngest of whom is photographer Priscilla Rattazzi. The marriage was dissolved in 1975. She divided her time between New York City and Italy and she was long a loyal fan of Robert Denning, of Denning & Fourcade, who designed over 15 homes for her in Manhattan, South America and Italy.

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Sándor Weöres
Sándor Weöres (Hungarian pronunciation: [ʃaːndor vørøʃ]; June 22, 1913 - 22 January 1989) was a Hungarian poet and author.
Born in Szombathely, Weöres was brought up in the nearby village of Csönge. His first poems appeared when he was nineteen, being published in the influential journal Nyugat ("West") through the acceptance of its editor, the poet Mihály Babits. Weöres attended the University of Pécs, studying law first before moving on to geography and history. He ultimately received a doctorate in philosophy and aesthetics. His doctoral dissertation The Birth of the Poem was published in 1939. It was in 1937 that he made the first of his travels abroad, going first to Manila for a Eucharistic Congress and then visiting Vietnam and India. During World War II Weöres was drafted for compulsory labor, but was not sent to the front. After the end of the war, he returned to Csönge and briefly lived as a farmer.
In 1948 Weöres again travelled abroad, residing in Italy until 1949. In 1951 he settled in Budapest where he would reside for the rest of his life. The imposition of Stalinism in Hungary after 1948 silenced Weöres and until 1964 little could be published.

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Sławomir Mrożek
Sławomir Mrożek (born 29 June 1930) is a Polish dramatist and writer. In 1963 Mrożek emigrated to France and then further to Mexico. In 1996 he returned to Poland and settled in Kraków. In 2008 he moved back to France.
Mrożek joined the Polish United Workers' Party during the reign of Stalinism in the People's Republic of Poland, and made a living as political journalist. He began writing plays in the late 1950s. His theatrical works belong to the genre of absurdist fiction, intended to shock the audience with non-realistic elements, political and historic references, distortion, and parody.
In 1953, during the Stalinist terror in postwar Poland, Mrożek was one of several signatories of an open letter from ZLP to Polish authorities supporting the persecution of Polish religious leaders imprisoned by the Ministry of Public Security. He participated in the defamation of Catholic priests from Kraków, three of whom were condemned to death by the Communist government in February 1953 after being groundlessly accused of treason (see: Stalinist show trial of the Kraków Curia for more details). Their death sentences were not enforced although Father Józef Fudali died in unexplained circumstances while in prison. Mrożek wrote a full-page article for the leading newspaper in support of the verdict, entitled "Zbrodnia główna i inne" (The Major and other Crimes), comparing death-row priests to degenerate SS-men and Ku-Klux-Klan.

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Tadeusz Różewicz
Tadeusz Różewicz (born 9 October 1921 in Radomsko, Poland) is a Polish poet and writer.
Różewicz belongs to the first generation born and educated after Poland regained its independence in 1918. His youthful poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army.
Unlike Janusz, who was executed by Gestapo in 1944, Tadeusz survived the war and by the time of his literary debut in 1960, he was the author of twelve highly acclaimed volumes of poetry. He has since also written over fifteen plays. This eruption of dramaturgical energy was also accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Różewicz is considered one of Poland's best post-war poets and most innovative playwrights.
Some of his best known plays include: The Card Index, The Interrupted Act, Birth Rate, The Hunger Artist Departs, and White Marriage. His New Poems was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.
Some works have been translated into German by Ilka Boll.

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Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."

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Thomas Sebeok
Thomas Albert Sebeok (born Sebők in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920; died December 21, 2001 in Bloomington, Indiana) was a polymathic^{[citation needed]}American semiotician and linguist.
Sebeok, a professor emeritus at Indiana University, expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, coining the term "zoosemiotics" and raising some of the issues addressed by the philosophy of mind. He was also among the founders of biosemiotics. As a linguist, he published several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language (referring to it by the name "Cheremis"). His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics. He was especially renowned for his ability to bring together specialists from neighboring fields in order to generate path-breaking perspectives on, for example, the study of myth, psycholinguistics, stylistics, animal communication and biosemiotics.

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Tiziano Scarpa
Tiziano Scarpa (born 16 May 1963) is an Italian novelist, playwright and poet.
Born in Venice, he won the 2009 Strega Prize for his novel, Stabat mater.

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Tommaso Landolfi
Tommaso Landolfi (9 August 1908 – 1979) was an Italian author and translator.
Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is An Autumn Story. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II.
Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.

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Ugo Riccarelli
Ugo Riccarelli (born 1954) is an Italian novelist and short story writer.
Born in Turin, Riccarelli read philosophy at the University of Turin. He won the Selezione Campiello Prize 1998 for Un uomo che forse si chiamava Schulz and the 2004 Strega Prize for his novel, Il dolore perfetto (The Perfect Pain).

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Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.
Eco has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont in northern Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.

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Vasko Popa
Vasko Popa (Serbian: Васко Попа, June 29, 1922, Grebenac - January 5, 1991) was a Serbian poet of Romanian descent.
Popa was born in the village of Grebenac (Romanian: Grebenaţ), Vojvodina, Serbia. After finishing high school, he enrolled as a student of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He continued his studies at the University of Bucharest and in Vienna. During World War II, he fought as a partisan and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Bečkerek (today Zrenjanin, Serbia).
After the war, in 1949, Popa graduated from the Romanic group of the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. He published his first poems in the magazines Književne novine (Literary Magazine) and the daily Borba (Struggle).
From 1954 until 1979 he was the editor of the publishing house Nolit. In 1953 he published his first major verse collection, Kora (Bark). His other important work included Nepočin-polje (No-Rest Field, 1956), Sporedno nebo (Secondary Heaven, 1968), Uspravna zemlja (Earth Erect, 1972), Vučja so (Wolf Salt, 1975), and Od zlata jabuka (Apple of Gold, 1978), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. His Collected Poems, 1943–1976, a compilation in English translation, appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poet Ted Hughes.

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Vincenzo Cardarelli
Vincenzo Cardarelli, pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli (May 1, 1887 - June 18, 1959) was an Italian journalist, writer and poet.
Cardarelli was born in Corneto, Lazio, to a family of Marche origin. His studies were irregular and he tried different jobs. In 1906, when he had moved to Rome, he began his career as a journalist.
His works include:

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Vincenzo Consolo
Vincenzo Consolo (February 18, 1933 – January 21, 2012) was an Italian writer.
Consolo was born in Sant'Agata di Militello, but resided in Milan from 1969 until his death. He began his literary career in 1963, but gained wider attention in 1976 with Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner) and went on to become an award-winning author.

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Vittorio Sgarbi
Vittorio Umberto Antonio Maria Sgarbi (born May 8, 1952 in Ferrara) is an Italian art critic, politician, cultural commentator and TV personality.
He was appointed curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Several times a member of the Italian Parliament and municipal governments like that of Milan, from June 30 2008 is the mayor of the Sicilian town of Salemi.
He has been condemned several times by various Italian courts for libel, malicious slander, absenteeism from workplace and production of false public documents.

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Vladimir Toporov
Vladimir Nikolayevich Toporov (Russian: Влади́мир Никола́евич Топоро́в; 5 July 1928, Moscow – 5 December 2005, Moscow) was a leading Russian philologist associated with the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. His wife was Tatyana Elizarenkova.
Toporov authored more than 1500 works, including Akhmatova and Dante (1972), Towards the Reconstruction of the Indo-European Rite (1982), Aeneas: a Man of Destiny (1993), Myth. Rite. Symbol. Image (1995), Holiness and Saints in the Russian Spiritual Culture (1998), and Petersburg Text of Russian Literature (2003). He translated the Dhammapada into Russian and supervised the ongoing edition of the most complete vocabulary of the Prussian language to date (5 volumes).
Among Toporov's many honours were the USSR State Prize (1990), which he turned down to voice his protest against the repressive policies of the Soviet administration in Lithuania; the first ever Solzhenitsyn Prize (1998), and the Andrei Bely Prize for 2004. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and many other scholarly societies.

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Václav Cílek
Václav Cílek (born 1955 in Brno) is Czech geologist, climatologist, writer, philosopher, science popularizer and translator of Tao and Zen texts.
In his youth, he moved to Tanzania, where his father worked as a geologist. From 1969 to 1970, he studied at a high school in Tanzania. Later he continued his studies at the Mining Technical School in Příbram (1970–1974). In 1979 he graduated in geology from the Charles University in Prague. Since 1980, he works in Geologic Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences and specializes on geology of Cenozoic Era. He also explores interactions between environment and civilization. In 2004, he became the director of the Geologic Institute.
Cílek also published several popularization books and many articles in journals and newspapers. During his career, he collaborated with Hospodářské noviny, Lidové noviny, Mladá fronta DNES, Mladý svět, Právo, Reflex, Respekt, Czech Television, Czech Radio etc. He was a co-creator of the TV series about caves of the Czech Republic, called Podzemní Čechy (The Underground Czechia, 2001).

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Václav Havel
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slaf ˈɦavɛl] ( listen); 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Havel was voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. At the time of his death he was Chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He was the founder of the VIZE 97 Foundation and the principal organizer of the Forum 2000 annual global conference.
Havel was one of the signatories of the Charter 77 manifesto, a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, and a council member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Havel received many recognitions, including the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award.

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Wang Bin
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Wikipedia Persondata
wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
William of Ockham
William of Ockham ( /ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Ockham's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.
William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age. It is believed that he studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Worthy Beginner" (an inceptor was a student formally admitted to the ranks of teachers by the university authorities). He was also known as the Doctor Invincibilis or "Unconquerable Teacher."

wn.com/William_of_Ockham
Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser (22 July 1926 – 24 January 2007) was a German literary scholar.
He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else (Steinbach) Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding (1950). A year later he was appointed an instructor at Heidelberg and in 1952 an assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he started to explore contemporary philosophy and literature, which deepened his interest in inter-cultural exchange. He subsequently lectured in many other parts of the world, including Asia and Israel.
He is known for his reader-response theory in literary theory. This theory began to evolve in 1967, while he was working in the University of Konstanz. Together with Hans Robert Jauss, he is considered to be the founder of Constance School of reception aesthetics. Reader-response theory shares many goals and insights with hermeneutics; both aim to describe the reader's contact with text and the author. Iser describes the process of first reading, the subsequent development of the text into a 'whole', and how the dialogue between the reader and text takes place. In his study of Shakespeare's histories, in particular Richard II, Iser interprets Richard's continually changing legal policy as expression of the desire for self-assertion. Here he follows Hans Blumenberg, and attempts to apply his theory of modernity to Shakespeare. In this theory of modernity is self-assertion, which responds to the destruction of scholastic rationalism in the nominalist revolution (with William of Ockham).

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Zbigniew Herbert
Zbigniew Herbert ['zbiɡɲɛf ˈxɛrbɛrt] ( listen) (29 October 1924 in Lwów [then Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine] – 28 July 1998 in Warsaw) was a Polish poet, essayist, drama writer, author of plays, and moralist. A member of the Polish resistance movement, Home Army (AK), during World War II, he is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers. While he was first published in the 1950's (a volume titled String of light was issued in 1956), soon after he voluntarily ceased submitting most of his works to official Polish government publications. He resumed publication in the 1980's, initially in the underground press.
He was a distant relative of the 17th century poet George Herbert.
Herbert was educated as an economist and a lawyer. Herbert was one of the main poets of the Polish opposition to communism. Starting in 1986, he lived in Paris, where he cooperated with the journal Zeszyty Literackie. He came back to Poland in 1992. On 1 July 2007 the Polish Government instituted 2008 as the Year of Zbigniew Herbert.

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Zdeněk Neubauer
Zdeněk Neubauer (born 30 May 1942) is Czech philosopher and biologist, remarkable especially for original interpretations in science history and epistemology.
Born in Brno to family of the Brno normative legal school representative Zdeněk Neubauer (sr.), he graduated from Charles University in Prague (1965 in microbiology, biology and chemistry, 1971 in philosophy). During his activity in Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples (1967–1970) he made several discoveries in genetics. In 1982 left the university because of nonconformist attitudes (both scientific and political). After that, he was mainly a philosopher (a programmer analyst by job), publishing underground. Since 1990, he has been a member of the department of philosophy and history of science at Charles University Faculty of Science.

wn.com/Zdeněk_Neubauer
Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman (born 19 November 1925 in Poznań) is a Polish sociologist. Since 1971, he has resided in England after being driven out of Poland by an anti-Semitic campaign, engineered by the Communist government which he had previously supported. Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds (and since 1990 emeritus professor), Bauman has become best known for his analyses of the links between modernity and the Holocaust, and of postmodern consumerism.
Zygmunt Bauman was born to non-practising Polish-Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, in 1925. When Poland was invaded by the Nazis in 1939 his family escaped eastwards into the Soviet Union. Bauman went on to serve in the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army, working as a political education instructor. He took part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour.
According to semi-official statements of a historian with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance made in the conservative magazine Ozon in May 2006, from 1945 to 1953 Bauman held a similar function in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military unit formed to combat Ukrainian nationalist insurgents and part of the remnants of the Polish Home Army.

wn.com/Zygmunt_Bauman

Umberto Eco talks with Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Paxman seemed slightly in awe as he attempted to lock wits with a top rated writer ...

published: 22 Nov 2011

author: nsotd5

Umberto Eco, Part 1 | Nov. 16, 2011 | Appel Salon

In a rare visit, Umberto Eco discusses his latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which takes ...

published: 22 Nov 2011

author: torontopubliclibrary

Umberto Eco in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

www.intelligencesquared.com This conversation took place at Kensington Town Hall on 19th N...

published: 23 Nov 2011

author: iqsquared

On the Ashes of Post-Modernism: A New Realism. A Conference with Umberto Eco

Prof. Umberto Eco lectures about New Realism in Philosophy and the differences with the Po...

published: 09 Nov 2011

author: iitaly

Umberto Eco

George interviews author Umberto Eco....

published: 18 Nov 2011

author: TheHour

Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery

chicagohumanities.org - See more Chicago Humanities Festival events. Umberto Eco is a lite...

published: 09 Dec 2011

author: ChicagoHumanities

Umberto Eco: The Vertigo of Lists - France

November 2009 view FRANCE: Umberto Eco, The Master Of Lists 6 Launches new book throughout...

published: 23 Nov 2009

author: journeymanpictures

Umberto Eco on Silvio Berlusconi

Legendary Italian novelist and intellectual ("The Prague Cemetery") Umberto Eco confesses ...

published: 17 Nov 2011

author: TheHour

Umberto Eco, Part 2 | Nov. 16, 2011 | Appel Salon

In a rare visit, Umberto Eco discusses his latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which takes ...

published: 22 Nov 2011

author: torontopubliclibrary

Il caffè letterario - 10 - Umberto Eco racconta Victor Hugo

Umberto Eco racconta Victor Hugo. Il caffè letterario è un'iniziativa de La Repubblica e l...

published: 17 May 2012

author: Manolo Trinci

PIERRE BAYARD & UMBERTO ECO - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - NYPL Live

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read: Pierre Bayard & Umberto Eco with Paul Holdengräb...

published: 20 Aug 2011

author: pawsoned

Sean Connery - Name of the rose

Film: "Name of the rose" Music: X TV "Count Down" For all fans of Sean Connery ^_^...

published: 14 Jan 2007

author: Astelaa

Umberto Eco all'Unical 16 Novembre 2006

Umberto Eco discute sulla bruttezza......

published: 16 Nov 2006

author: Andrea Belcastro

Sternstunde Philosophie - Umberto Eco

Perpetuum mobile der Literatur. Der Schriftsteller und Philosoph Umberto Eco im Gespräch m...

published: 26 Oct 2009

author: SchweizerFernsehen

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photo: AP / Virginie Nguyen Huang

In this Monday, Dec. 17, 2012 photo, a Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during fighting with the Syrian Army in Azaz, Syria.

Syria's chemical weapons safe for now: Russia

Newstrack India

23 Dec 2012

Tweet. Moscow, Dec 23 (IANS/RIA Novosti) Chemical weapons in Syria are under the control of the government, which has consolidated them in one or two locations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "As of right now, the (Syrian) government is doing all it can to safeguard those weapons," he said. "We are following all leads concerning chemical weapons," Lavrov said ... "My answer is very simple. Why use us as a postman ... pm/ ... ) .. ). ... . ....(size: 3.2Kb)

photo: Creative Commons / Giorgione

Anbetung der Hirten (Adoration of the Shepherds) (c. 1500–10), by Italian painter Giorgio da Castelfranco. Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary as a fulfillment of the Old Testament's Messianic prophecy.

Liberating Burdensome and Tortuous Beasts (An Animal Liberation Theology)

WorldNews.com

24 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. A deadly silence immediately followed after a bullet penetrated the calf's skull. Against my wishes, Vic had decided against either amputating its leg or contacting a veterinarian-something he reasoned would have been too expensive. The unfortunate calf had slid down into a ravine where its hind leg, which was mangled and torn, became wrapped in barbed wire ... But it was more than a bellow ... 9....(size: 6.3Kb)

photo: AP / Musadeq Sadeq

A member of security escorts a U.S. convoy in to the Kabul police headquarters, where a an American advisor was killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Dec. 24, 2012.

Afghan policewoman kills US adviser in Kabul

my SA

24 Dec 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American adviser outside the police headquarters in Kabul on Monday, the latest in a rising tide of insider attacks by Afghans against their foreign allies, senior Afghan officials said. The woman, identified as Afghan police Sgt ... The woman was taken into Afghan custody shortly after the attack ... As many Afghans, the policewoman uses only one name ... Air Force Lt. Col ... Gen ... ....(size: 4.6Kb)

photo: AP / Altaf Qadri

Indian police officers baton charge protesters near the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Dec. 22, 2012.

India govt to probe gang-rape, enhance punishment

Khaleej Times

23 Dec 2012

A commission will be set up to probe the gang-rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi and measures to ensure such crimes do not recur while laws will be amended to enhance punishment for rape, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said . He also appealed the thousands of protesters on the capital’s streets, demanding justice for the victim, to withdraw ... “The government is serious on the issue. ...  . . ....(size: 2.4Kb)

photo: AP

Members of Myanmar Fire Brigade team gather near a damaged Air Bagan passenger plane in Heho, Shan State, Myanmar, Tuesday, Dec. 25, 2012.

Two killed and 11 injured in Burma emergency landing

BBC News

25 Dec 2012

Two people, including a young child, have been killed and another 11 injured during an emergency landing in Burma, officials say. The Air Bagan plane was carrying more than 60 passengers, many of whom were foreign nationals ... "The cause of the accident is not clear yet ... ....(size: 1.4Kb)

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'Jersey Shore' series finale: The death of the Duck Phone and the face of the new America

IMDb

21 Dec 2012

The final episode of Jersey Shore — the highest-rated series in MTV history; the first important artifact of the Meme Generation era, when ......(size: 0.7Kb)

Why is U.S. politics so scary? Blame Hollywood

Denver Post

16 Dec 2012

I've finally figured out why we spend so much time treating our political opponents as implacably evil. It's because Hollywood, which used to offer us villains we could love reviling, seems to have forgotten how to make its bad guys bad ... As it turns out, he's not evil ... Oh ... Author Umberto Eco argues "that morality intervenes not when we pretend we have no enemies but when we try to understand them, to put ourselves in their situation." ... ....(size: 5.6Kb)

Why Are Our Politics So Scary? Blame Hollywood

Bloomberg

07 Dec 2012

I’ve finally figured out why we spend so much time treating our political opponents as implacably evil ... As it turns out, he’s not evil ... Umberto Eco, in the title essay of his newly published collection, “Inventing the Enemy,” argues “that morality intervenes not when we pretend we have no enemies but when we try to understand them, to put ourselves in their situation.” Perhaps that is true in the real world of international relations ... ....(size: 9.3Kb)

Speech by President Herman Van Rompuy, on the occasion of the presentation of the European Book Prize (Council of the European Union)

noodls

05 Dec 2012

EUROPEAN COUNCIL THE PRESIDENT. Brussels, 5 December 2012. EUCO 232/12. PRESSE 511. PR PCE 195. Speech by the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy,. on the occasion of the presentation of the European Book Prize. European Parliament, 5 December 2012. "The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel", says Umberto Eco. "Once invented, it cannot be improved" ... Such works deserve our respect ... Indeed....(size: 6.2Kb)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Helps Facebook Fans Share the Gift of Reading Through Polar Express Book Donation Campaign (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company)

noodls

29 Nov 2012

For every new fan who "likes" the Polar Express-themed HMH Kids Facebook page through December 25, a book will be donated to a child in need, in partnership with literacy organization First Book ... HMH publishes such distinguished authors as Philip Roth, Temple Grandin, Tim O'Brien, and Umberto Eco, as well a celebrated roster of children's authors and illustrators including Lois Lowry and David Wiesner ... About First Book ... distributed by....(size: 5.2Kb)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Helps Facebook Fans Share the Gift of Reading Through Polar Express Book Donation Campaign

Business Wire

28 Nov 2012

Up to 25,000 books to be donated to children in need in partnership with First Book ... HMH Kids Facebook fans are also encouraged to share holiday playlists and Polar Express-themed photos ... HMH publishes such distinguished authors as Philip Roth, Temple Grandin, Tim O’Brien, and Umberto Eco, as well a celebrated roster of children’s authors and illustrators including Lois Lowry and David Wiesner ... About First Book ... Contacts ... ....(size: 7.8Kb)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Introduces Curious George® Multi-Touch Digital Storybook and Activities Series for the iPad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company)

noodls

26 Nov 2012

Boston-- Nov 26th, 2012-- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the release of the first two titles in the Curious George® Multi-Touch Storybook and Activities Series for the iPad ... ... ... HMH publishes such distinguished authors as Philip Roth, Temple Grandin, Tim O'Brien, and Umberto Eco, and a celebrated roster of children's authors and illustrators including Lois Lowry, Chris Van Allsburg, and David Wiesner ... A....(size: 5.0Kb)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Introduces Curious George® Multi-Touch Digital Storybook and Activities Series for the iPad

Business Wire

26 Nov 2012

Enhanced Interactive Features Enable Readers to Play an Active Role in George’s Adventures ... Special features include embedded slideshows and animation, touch-responsive puzzles, and comprehension activities ... HMH publishes such distinguished authors as Philip Roth, Temple Grandin, Tim O’Brien, and Umberto Eco, and a celebrated roster of children’s authors and illustrators including Lois Lowry, Chris Van Allsburg, and David Wiesner ... A ... ....(size: 7.2Kb)

50 Years of Bond, James Bond

CounterPunch

24 Nov 2012

He was right ... Okay ... the briefcase with knives and gold sovereigns, the Aston Martin DBS with ejector seat and saw-blades in the wheel hubs … In the mid 1960s Umberto Eco wrote an interesting essay about Fleming in which he discussed the author’s stylistic technique. ‘Fleming takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy,’ Eco wrote, ‘because it is upon the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for identification ... ....(size: 26.8Kb)

C.J.: Creator lets the gatto out of the bag about Lorenzo

Star Tribune

22 Nov 2012

Deceptively handsome Lorenzo Lucid could've had a mess of Thanksgiving meals, delicious or romantic, with Facebook.com friends who like him. If only the Lucid Brewing-loving Italian from "Excelsior" were real ... "You can blow Lorenzo's cover. It's TOO MUCH PRESSURE for me!" said Birt ... "Hello Lorenzo, I like the name of your beer ... "He also BSes about studying under Umberto Eco, the famous Italian author." ... ....(size: 4.6Kb)

Catholics urged to keep the faith and 'just hang in there'

Canberra Times

18 Nov 2012

Archbishop Denis Hart leaves St Patrick's Cathedral after celebrating Mass on Sunday. Photo. Michael Clayton-Jones ... Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart addressed a congregation of about 200 people at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne ... He drew on conversations between Cardinal Martini and Italian author and theorist Umberto Eco on ''the end of time'' to outline a way for believers to maintain the faith under pressure ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)

The Infinity of Lists, By Umberto Eco

The Independent

17 Nov 2012

The astounding illustrations range from Bosch and mass martyrdoms to Richard Dadd's fairyland, and libraries ... ....(size: 0.6Kb)

Fifty years of most glorious villains

Sydney Morning Herald

17 Nov 2012

Sean Connery's Bond is, as always, cool under fire ... In a 1960s study of the structure of Ian Fleming's original novels, the Italian literary critic Umberto Eco observed that every Bond story was based on a system of opposed elements - duty/sacrifice, love/death, Bond and his villain - that played out like a chess game ... Advertisement ....(size: 1.6Kb)

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For the currency, see Eco (currency).

Umberto Eco

Born	(1932-01-05) 5 January 1932 (age 80) Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Semiotics
Notable ideas	The "open work" ("opera aperta")
Influenced by James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Sanders Peirce, Immanuel Kant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Piaget, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, Luigi Pareyson, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Conan Doyle
Signature

Semiotics
General concepts
Biosemiotics · Code Computational semiotics Connotation · Decode Denotation · Encode · Lexical Literary semiotics · Modality Representation (arts) · Salience Semeiotic · Semiosis · Semiosphere Semiotic elements & sign classes Sign · Sign relational complex Sign relation · Umwelt · Value
Methods
Commutation test Paradigmatic analysis Syntagmatic analysis
Semioticians
Mikhail Bakhtin · Roland Barthes Marcel Danesi · John Deely Umberto Eco · Algirdas Julien Greimas Félix Guattari · Louis Hjelmslev Roman Jakobson · Roberta Kevelson Kalevi Kull · Juri Lotman Charles S. Peirce · Augusto Ponzio Ferdinand de Saussure Thomas Sebeok · Michael Silverstein Eero Tarasti · Jakob von Uexküll Vyacheslav Ivanov · Vladimir Toporov
Related topics
Structuralism Post-structuralism Aestheticization Postmodernity
v t e

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.

Eco has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 Semiotics
4 Action in anthropology
5 Novels
6 Selected bibliography
7 References
8 External links

Biography [link]

Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont in northern Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews.^[1] His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.^[2]

His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his Laurea in philosophy in 1954. During his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Roman Catholic Church.^[3]^[4] After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–1964). A group of avant-garde artists, painters, musicians, writers, whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63), became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.

In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.^[5] In 1992–1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University. On May 23, 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eco is a member of the Italian skeptic organization CICAP.^[6]

Works [link]

Studies on medieval aesthetics [link]

In 1959, he published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale (The Development of Medieval Aesthetics), which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medieval philosophy and proved his literary worth to his father. After 18 months' military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior non-fiction editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, a position he occupied until 1975. Eco's work on medieval aesthetics stressed the distinction between theory and practice.^{[citation needed]} About the Middle Ages, he wrote that there was "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and on the other [hand] the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions", the two cut off from one another as if by a pane of glass. Eco's work in literary theory has changed focus over time. Initially, he was one of the pioneers of "Reader Response".^{[citation needed]}

Literary criticism [link]

During these years,^[which?] Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best—although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance.^{[citation needed]} I. A. Richards and others said as much, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this idea.^{[citation needed]} He also extended the axis of meaning from the continually deferred meanings of words in an utterance to a play between expectation and fulfilment of meaning.^{[citation needed]} Eco comes to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as did theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans-Robert Jauss, on the other).

Studies on mass media and mass culture [link]

From the late '50s till the late '60s, before his semiotic turn, Eco engaged in studies on mass media and mass culture, which were published in various newspapers and journals.^[7] According to some^[who?] these studies were influential although he did not develop a full-scale theory in this field.^{[citation needed]}

His short 1961 essay Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno (Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno, on the most popular quiz show host, Mike Bongiorno), received much notoriety among the general public, and has drawn endless questions by journalists in every public appearance by Eco; it was later included in the collection Diario minimo (1963). His book Apocalittici e integrati (1964) analyzes the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociological perspective.

In 1967 he gave the influential lecture Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,^[8] which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla," and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming.^{[citation needed]} Among the expressions used in the essay, are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla."^[9]^[10] The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.

Semiotics [link]

Eco co-founded Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici (known as VS among Italian academics), an influential semiotic journal. VS has become an important publication platform for many scholars whose work is related to signs and signification. The journal's foundation and activities have contributed to the growing influence of semiotics as an academic field in its own right, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Most of the well-known European semioticians, among them Eco, A.J. Greimas, Jean-Marie Floch, Paolo Fabbri, Jacques Fontanille, Claude Zilberberg, Ugo Volli and Patrizia Violi, have published original articles in VS. Articles by younger, less famous scholars dealing with new research perspectives in semiotics also find place in almost every issue of VS.

Action in anthropology [link]

Eco receiving the honoris causa degree in architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria from rector Alessandro Bianchi

In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called Anthropology of the West from the perspective of non-Westerners (African and Chinese scholars), as defined by their own criteria. Eco developed this transcultural international network based on the idea of Alain Le Pichon in West Africa. The Bologna program resulted in a first conference in Guangzhou, China, in 1991 entitled "Frontiers of Knowledge." The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on "Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal" along the silk trade route from Canton to Beijing. The latter culminated in a book entitled The Unicorn and the Dragon, which discussed the question of the creation of knowledge in China and in Europe. Scholars contributing to this volume were from China, including Tang Yijie, Wang Bin and Yue Dayun, as well as from Europe: (Furio Colombo, Antoine Danchin, Jacques Le Goff, Paolo Fabbri, Alain Rey)^[11]

In 2000 a seminar in Timbuktu (Mali), was followed by another gathering in Bologna to reflect on the conditions of reciprocal knowledge between East and West. This in turn gave rise to a series of conferences in Brussels, Paris, and Goa, culminating in Beijing in 2007. The topics of the Beijing conference were "Order and Disorder","New Concepts of War and Peace", "Human Rights" and "Social Justice and Harmony". Eco presented the opening lecture. The following anthropologists gave presentations: from India (Balveer Arora, Varun Sahni, Rukmini Bhaya Nair); from Africa (Moussa Sow); from Europe (Roland Marti, Maurice Olender); from Korea (Cha Insuk); from China (Huang Ping, Zhao Tinyang). Also on the program were scholars from the domains of law or science: (Antoine Danchin, Ahmed Djebbar, Dieter Grimm).^[12] Eco's interest in East/West dialogue to facilitate international communication and understanding also correlates with his related interest in the international auxiliary language Esperanto.

Novels [link]

Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cites James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.^[13]

Eco employed his education as a medievalist in his first novel The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th century monastery. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is to host an important religious debate. The novel contains many direct or indirect metatextual references to other sources, requiring the detective work of the reader to 'solve'. The title is unexplained in the book. As a symbol, the rose is ubiquitous enough to not confer any single meaning.^[14] There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the blind monk and librarian Jorge of Burgos: Borges, like Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life. William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a monk and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Several passages describing him are strongly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's description of Sherlock Holmes^[15]^[16] . The underlying mystery of the murder is borrowed from the "Arabian Nights". The Name of the Rose was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Christian Slater and Ron Perlman which employs the plot rather than the philosophical and historical themes from the novel.

In Foucault's Pendulum (1988), three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.

The Island of the Day Before (1994) was Eco's third novel. The book, set in the seventeenth century, is about a man marooned on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be marooned.

Baudolino was published in 2000. Baudolino is a knight who saves the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination, through his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags of his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian (and the reader) unsure of just how much of his story was a lie.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past.

The Prague Cemetery, Eco's 6th novel, was published in 2010. It is the story of a secret agent who "weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the European Continent." The book is a narrative of the rise of Modern-day antisemitism, by way of the Dreyfus Affair, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other important 19th century events which gave rise to hatred and hostility toward the Jewish people.

Selected bibliography [link]

Main article: Bibliography of Umberto Eco

Novels [link]

Il nome della rosa (1980; English translation: The Name of the Rose, 1983)
Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; English translation: Foucault's Pendulum, 1989)
L'isola del giorno prima (1994; English translation: The Island of the Day Before, 1995)
Baudolino (2000; English translation: Baudolino, 2001)
La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004; English translation: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2005)
Il cimitero di Praga (2010; English translation: The Prague Cemetery, 2011)

Non-fiction books [link]

Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956 – English translation: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1988, revised)
"Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale", in Momenti e problemi di storia dell'estetica (1959 – Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 1985)
Opera aperta (1962, rev. 1976 – English translation: The Open Work (1989)
Diario Minimo (1963 – English translation: Misreadings, 1993)
Apocalittici e integrati (1964 – Partial English translation: Apocalypse Postponed, 1994)
Le poetiche di Joyce (1965 – English translations: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, 1989)
La Struttura Assente (1968 – The Absent Structure)
Il costume di casa (1973 – English translation: Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, 1986)
Trattato di semiotica generale (1975 – English translation: A Theory of Semiotics, 1976)
Il Superuomo di massa (1976)
Dalla periferia dell'impero (1977)
Lector in fabula (1979)
The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979 – English edition containing essays from Opera aperta, Apocalittici e integrati, Forme del contenuto (1971), Il Superuomo di massa, Lector in Fabula).
Sette anni di desiderio (1983)
Postille al nome della rosa (1983 – English translation: Postscript to The Name of the Rose, 1984)
Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio (1984 – English translation: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 1984)
De Bibliotheca (1986 – in Italian and French)
I limiti dell'interpretazione (1990 – The Limits of Interpretation, 1990)
Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992 – with R. Rorty, J. Culler, C. Brooke-Rose; edited by S. Collini)
La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993 – English translation: The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe), 1995)
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994)
Incontro – Encounter – Rencontre (1996 – in Italian, English, French)
In cosa crede chi non crede? (with Carlo Maria Martini), 1996 – English translation: Belief or Nonbelief?: A Dialogue, 2000)
Cinque scritti morali (1997 – English translation: Five Moral Pieces, 2001)
Kant e l'ornitorinco (1997 – English translation: Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, 1999)
Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998)
How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays (1998 – Partial English translation of Il secondo diario minimo, 1994)
Experiences in Translation, University of Toronto Press (2000)
Sulla letteratura, (2003 – English translation by Martin McLaughlin: On Literature, 2004)
Mouse or Rat?: Translation as negotiation (2003)
Storia della bellezza (2004, co-edited with Girolamo de Michele – English translation: History of Beauty/On Beauty, 2004)
A passo di gambero. Guerre calde e populismo mediatico (Bompiani, 2006 – English translation: Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, 2007, Alastair McEwen)
Storia della bruttezza (Bompiani, 2007 – English translation: On Ugliness, 2007)
Dall'albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione (Bompiani, 2007)
La Vertigine della Lista (Rizzoli, 2009) - English translation: The Infinity of Lists
Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (Bompiani, 2011)

Anthologies [link]

Eco, Umberto; Sebeok, Thomas A., eds. (1984), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-35235-4

Ten essays on methods of abductive inference in Poe's Dupin, Doyle's Holmes, Peirce and many others, 236 pages..

Books for children [link]

(Art by Eugenio Carmi)

La bomba e il generale (1966, Rev. 1988 – English translation: The Bomb and the General)
I tre cosmonauti (1966 – English translation: The Three Astronauts)
Gli gnomi di Gnu (1992 – English translation: The Gnomes of Gnu)

References [link]

^ Don Bosco in Umberto Eco's latest book N7: News publication for the Salesian community p.4 June 2004
^ A Short Biography of Umberto Eco 22 March 2004
^ A Resounding Eco in Time, June 13, 2005 quote: "His new book touches on politics, but also on faith. Raised Catholic, Eco has long since left the church. "Even though I'm still in love with that world, I stopped believing in God in my 20s after my doctoral studies on St. Thomas Aquinas. You could say he miraculously cured me of my faith,"
^ Liukkonen, Petri (2003) Umberto Eco (1932–) – Pseudonym: Dedalus
^ Farndale, Nigel (2005-05-24). "Heavyweight champion". Telegraph.co.uk. The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3642577/Heavyweight-champion.html. Retrieved 2009-10-23.
^ McMahon, Barbara (October 6, 2005). "No blood, sweat or tears". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/06/worlddispatch.italy. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
^ Capozzi (2008)
^ Strangelove (2005) pp.104-5 quote: "oft-quoted article"
^ Eco (1967)
^ Bondanella (2005) pp.53, 88–9
^ "A Conversation on Information" Interview with Umberto Eco by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995
^ "Vegetal and mineral memory", November 2003. Considers, among other things, encyclopedias
^ Eco (2006) On Literature Vintage
^ Eco, Umberto; Translator: W. Weaver. (1985) (in English, translated from Italian.). Reflections on The Name of the Rose. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited.
^ Eco, Umberto (1986). The Name of the Rose. New York: Warner Books. pp. 10. ISBN 0-446-34410-9.
^ Doyle, Arthur Conan (2003). Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Vol 1. New York: Bantam Books. pp. 11. ISBN 0-553-21241-9.

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Umberto Eco

Official Website from the Scuola superiore di studi umanistici
Porta Ludovica: An extensive Umberto Eco resource.
Umberto Eco Wiki - wiki annotation guide to Eco's works
Lila Azam Zanganeh (Summer 2008). "Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/the-art-of-fiction-no-197-umberto-eco.
Website on Umberto Eco
Audio: Eco talk at UC Berkeley (1982): "From Aristotle to Sherlock Holmes" (online audio recording)
"We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die" interview by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris.

v t e Works of Umberto Eco

Novels	The Name of the Rose Foucault's Pendulum The Island of the Day Before Baudolino The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana The Prague Cemetery

Non-fiction	The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages The Open Work Misreadings Apocalypse Postponed The Middle Ages of James Joyce The Absent Structure Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality A Theory of Semiotics Il Superuomo di massa Dalla periferia dell'impero Lector in fabula The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts Sette anni di desiderio Postscript to The Name of the Rose Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language De Bibliotheca The Limits of Interpretation Interpretation and Overinterpretation The Search for the Perfect Language Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Incontro - Encounter - Rencontre Belief or Nonbelief?: A Dialogue Five Moral Pieces Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition Serendipities: Language and Lunacy How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays Experiences in Translation On Literature Mouse or Rat?: Translation as negotiation Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism On Beauty/History of Beauty On Ugliness Dall'albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione The Infinity of Lists Confessions of a Young Novelist

Manual	Come si fa una tesi di laurea

Books for children	The Bomb and the General The Three Astronauts The Gnomes of Gnu

Awards received by Umberto Eco

Recipients of the Bancarella Prize

Recipients of the Strega Prize

Recipients of the Austrian State Prize for European Literature

Zbigniew Herbert (1965)
W. H. Auden (1966)
Vasko Popa (1967)
Václav Havel (1968)
nobody (1969)
Eugène Ionesco (1970)
Sławomir Mrożek (1971)
Peter Huchel (1972)
Harold Pinter (1973)
Sándor Weöres (1974)
Pavel Kohout (1975)
Italo Calvino (1976)
Fulvio Tomizza (1977)
Simone de Beauvoir (1978)
nobody (1979)
Sarah Kirsch (1980)
Doris Lessing (1981)
Tadeusz Różewicz (1982)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1983)
Christa Wolf (1984)
nobody (1985)
Stanisław Lem (1986)
Milan Kundera (1987)
Andrzej Szczypiorski (1988)
Marguerite Duras (1989)
Helmut Heißenbüttel (1990)
Péter Nádas (1991)
Salman Rushdie (1992)
Chinghiz Aitmatov (1993)
Inger Christensen (1994)
Ilse Aichinger (1995)
Aleksandar Tišma (1996)
Jürg Laederach (1997)
Antonio Tabucchi (1998)
Dubravka Ugrešić (1999)
António Lobo Antunes (2000)
Umberto Eco (2001)
Christoph Hein (2002)
Cees Nooteboom (2003)
Julian Barnes (2004)
Claudio Magris (2005)
Jorge Semprún (2006)
A. L. Kennedy (2007)
Agota Kristof (2008)
Per Olov Enquist (2009)
Paul Nizon (2010)
Javier Marías (2011)

v t e The VIZE 97 Prize recipients

Karl H. Pribram (1999) Umberto Eco (2000) Zdeněk Neubauer (2001) Joseph Weizenbaum (2002) Robert Reich (2003) Petr Vopěnka (2004) Philip Zimbardo (2005) Zygmunt Bauman (2006) Stanislav Grof (2007) Julia Kristeva (2008) Václav Cílek (2009) Konrad Paul Liessmann (2010)

Persondata
Name	Eco, Umberto
Alternative names
Short description	Writer and philosopher
Date of birth	1932-01-05
Place of birth	Alessandria
Date of death
Place of death

Authority control: PND: 11852884X | LCCN: n79021285 | VIAF: 108299403 | WorldCat

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Eco, Umberto Filmography

Famous quotes by Umberto Eco:

"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb."

"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."

"If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity"

"Translation is the art of failure."

"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else"

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

Make changes yourself !

Contents

Biography [link]

Works [link]

Studies on medieval aesthetics [link]

Literary criticism [link]

Studies on mass media and mass culture [link]

Semiotics [link]

Action in anthropology [link]

Novels [link]

Selected bibliography [link]

Novels [link]

Non-fiction books [link]

Anthologies [link]

Books for children [link]

References [link]

External links [link]

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