Giuseppe Culicchia

“Everything has changed over the last forty years and I think that this is above all related to the fact that the only value that has remained in our so-called civilisation is money.” A hard-hitting writer, Giuseppe Culicchia discompassionately dismantles contemporary society and the perverse mechanisms of the reign of consumerism with stalwart cynicism. While he is still little known in France, he is a major author of contemporary Italian literature.

Born in Turin in 1965, Giuseppe Culicchia began his career as a translator and independent journalist for various newspapers, such as La Stampa. From 1989, he worked in the bookshop of the Rizzoli publishing house in Turin. In 1990, he published five short tales in the anthology Papergang, presenting previously unpublished Italian authors. But it was in 1995 that he truly made his entrance onto the Italian scene, with the publication of his first novel, Patatras. A success that was as dazzling as it was surprising, the latter received several awards and was even adapted to film in 1997. In the same year, he also published Paso Doble. The two books present the same hero, Walter, whose social ascension serves as a pretext for painting a vitriolic portrait of contemporary society. In 2004, he also published Il paese delle meraviglie, in which he evokes the sombre events that took place in Italy in the seventies, a period marked by terrorism; and Un’estate al mare, in 2007, in which he focuses on the more limited world of family life, without losing a whit of his irony. His books have now been translated into a dozen languages.