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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Marta Morazzoni

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Marta Morazzoni (photo courtesy of Giorgio Guenzani and the author)

Marta Morazzoni is not only an author of novels, essays, and short stories, but also a theatre critic and literary translator, having translated the works of Edith Wharton, Olaf Olafsson, and Eran Kroband among others. Until recently, she also taught Italian literature in high school in Gallarate (Lombardy). 

Morazzoni was born in Milan in 1950. She graduated in cultural anthropology from the University of Milan with a thesis on the Eskimos living in Canada and Greenland. It may be assumed that her interest in Northern people triggered her preference for the white light, cool spaces, and restrained static scenery frequently visible in her books.

Her literary vocation, which Morazzoni felt just after completing her studies, initially resulted in a number of stories which she sent to the literary critic Pietro Citati in 1983. In 1986, thanks to Citati’s interest and enthusiastic appraisal, the publisher Longanesi released Morazzoni’s first collection, La ragazza col turbante. The book was a huge success, obtaining the Premio Racalmare Leonardo Sciascia in the following year and being translated into nine languages. The collection comprises five literary fantasies with well-known artists or rulers as protagonists, and explores the fate of famous works of art: we read about Mozart and Constance, Lorenzo da Ponte, the Emperor Charles V, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. One thread connecting these texts is the brutality which prevails in the relationships between characters. Morazzoni skilfully creates an atmosphere of suspense, secrecy, and danger, together with the expectation of something that does not always happen.

La ragazza col turbante was followed by a prolific and successful decade. Morazzoni wrote four novels, three of which were awarded prestigious literary prizes. The first novel, L’invenzione della verità, published in 1988, obtained the Premio Campiello. Casa materna, which followed in 1992, won the Premio Selezione Campiello. In 1996, the next novel appeared, L’estuario. One year later, Il caso Courrier was also awarded the Premio Campiello. In 1995 her translation of Edith Wharton's The Gods Arrive was published by Corbaccio entitled Il canto delle muse.

At the turn of the century, Morazzoni briefly moved away from the past and, in 2002, published a disturbing novel, Una lezione di stile, set in modern England. However, she returned to the past and great historic figures in 2005, in a narrative set in the 18th century, Un incontro inatteso per il consigliere Goethe. This period also allowed her to test her strengths in other literary genres. In 2006, she published an artistic and literary guide to Amsterdam, La città del desiderio, Amsterdam. Here, Morazzoni, a lover of Vermeer and Flemish culture, shows the reader around the city with passion and lyricism. In 2008, she wrote 37 libri e un cane, a literary autobiography and personal guide to literature. In the same year, she published a collection of lectures on her favourite and most valued authors: Proust, Musil, Poe, and Goethe. She returned to narrative and historical figures in her last two novels, both featuring unusual, brave, and emblematic female protagonists. La nota segreta (2010) is about Paola Pietra, a young countess, unknown though reported in historical chronicles, who was forced to enter a convent: with an amazing talent for singing, this extremely strong and uncompromising woman, who is open to various forms of life, stands up against the system. Il fuoco di Jeanne (2014) tells the story from girlhood to adulthood of Jeanne D’Arc, a character modelled on Joan of Arc. Instead of approaching her protagonist as a symbol and an archetype, Morazzoni reconstructs the figure buried under the layers of myth and legend and creates a modern historical novel. 

In 2018, Marta Morazzoni was awarded the Premio Fondazione Il Campiello 2018 in recognition of her career. She was praised for having ‘always stood out for the original characteristics of a stylistically tense, guarded, and introspective writing’. The following year Il dono di Arianna was published, a collection of ten short stories which bring to life Greek mythology, in a passionate reinterpretation that reveals the ongoing power of myth to speak about universal themes. The book won the Premio Chiara (2019) and the Premio Speciale Ceppo Letteratura e Vita Leone Piccioni (2020).

Marta Morazzoni’s books entrance through delicately built emotions, perfect language, sophisticated surroundings, and masterful images. The beautiful visual quality of her prose and its intense yet ambiguous emotions confer power and originality upon her work. The author sensitively brings her readers into remote corners of time and space, places and past times that are at once known and unknown, rendering the experiences that are being recounted almost real and tangible. Morazzoni’s prose may be perfectly described by means of the oxymoron ‘invented truth’. The one variable in the evolution of this author’s writing is her style, its initial sophisticated elegance, linearity, and cool moderation being gradually replaced by sensuality and dynamism.

Compiled by Barbara Kornacka (Poznan)