Francesca Cricelli

Profile

Dr Francesca Cricelli holds a PhD in Literary Studies and Translation from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. During her research, she discovered an unpublished archive of nearly 400 letters written by the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti to his last muse, Bruna Bianco. The archive had been inaccessible for over 50 years. During her doctoral research, Francesca organised, transcribed, and translated a selection of those letters from Italian into Portuguese.The letters are now available for public consultation at Fondazione Mondadori in Milan. Besides researching, Francesca has taught translation practices and creative writing in Brazil at Casa Guilherme de Almeida and Casa das Rosas, both institutions part of the State Government of São Paulo. She has worked as a literary translator for years, having translated into Portuguese Italian authors such as Elena Ferrante, Igiaba Scego, Claudia Durastanti, Paola Masino, Lisa Ginzburg, and Jhumpa Lahiri. During her time at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, she will be working at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing pursuing research on translingual authors, in a project entitled 'The crossroads of identity: translingualism and translation. A look into the latest works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Igiaba Scego, Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek'. Francesca has already translated a number of works by Jhumpa Lahiri and Igiaba Scego for the Brazilian publishing market. Since moving to Iceland in 2019, she has added to her research scope translingual women writers based in Iceland and, with this in mind, she will be also analysing the works of authors Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek during her stay at ILCS.