Skip to main content
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Melania Mazzucco

Melania Mazzucco.jpg
Melania Mazzucco (Authorised photo by Corinne Veysselier via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Melania Mazzucco is one of the most interesting and valued contemporary female writers in Italy, acclaimed both there and abroad. Her novels have been translated into many languages, not only into the most popular languages like French, English, German and Spanish, but also into Romanian, Serbian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish. Some of her books are even available in Chinese, Turkish, Hebrew, Korean and Georgian. 46 translators have translated Mazzucco’s books.

Mazzucco was born on 6 October 1966, the daughter of the writer Roberto Mazzucco. Having graduated in 1990 from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in 1992 she went on to obtain a degree in History of Modern and Contemporary Literature from La Sapienza University, Rome, with a thesis on the novelist Paolo Volponi. In the early 1990s she wrote a number of screenplays, winning the Franco Solinas award for the best Italian screenplay for Rh negative (1990). The Città di Milano – lo Sguardo degli altri award followed for the best screenplay on the theme of disability which she wrote together with Luigi Guarnieri. Continuing her collaboration with Guarnieri, she created the screenplay for Maurizio Ponti’s movie Vietato ai minori, which won the 1993 Franco Solinas award. The following year she wrote the screenplay for another of Maurizio Ponti’s movies, Italiani. She also worked for the Enciclopedia Treccani where she was responsible for the literature and performing arts section. 

Mazzucco’s first publication, the short story ‘Seval’, appeared in Nuovi Argomenti in 1991. But it was in 1996 that her career as a writer took off with the novel Il bacio della Medusa, winning two prizes, the prestigious Premio Strega and the Oplonti d’argento per l’opera prima, which made her work known to a wider public. Two years later she published La camera di Baltus, a novel set in three different eras. In 2000 Lei così amata appeared, a fictionalized biography of a little-known Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, which won the Superpremio Vittorini, Premio Napoli, and Premio Bari for fiction. Her next novel, Vita, about Italian emigration to the United States, was published in 2003; awarded the Premio Strega, it gained popularity abroad and also won the Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente award in Spain for best foreign novel, the Globe and Mail Book of the Year award in Canada in 2005, while it was the New York Times Book Review editor’s choice and was included among the top ten best novels of the year by Publishers Weekly.

In 2005 she published Il giorno perfetto, which was awarded the Premio Hemingway and the Premio Roma. It tells the story of 24 hours in the life of a number of characters in contemporary Rome and was later adapted for film by the director Ferzan Özpetek. Her next two works were dedicated to the great Venetian painter, Tintoretto: the first, La lunga attesa dell’angelo (2008), was awarded the Premio Bagutta, the Premio Scanno, and the readers’ prize of the Biblioteche di Roma; the second, Jacomo Tintoretto e i suoi figli. Storia di una famiglia veneziana (2009), was awarded the Premio Benedetto Croce, Premio Pozzale Luigi Russo, Premio Palmi, Premio Comisso for essays, Premio Viareggio-Tobino and Premio De Sica. In 2012 she published the novel Limbo, the story of a female soldier wounded in Afghanistan, which won the Premio Elsa Morante for fiction, Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane, and Premio Giacomo Matteotti. In the same year she published her first novel for children, Il bassotto e la Regina. In 2013 another novel, Sei come sei, about two gay men who raise a daughter together, came out. Three years later, in 2016, she published the book which won the award Libro dell’anno 2016 di Radio3 Fahrenheit: Io sono con te. Storia di Brigitte. The book was born out of a meeting between Mazzucco and Brigitte, a woman who escaped from the Congo and lived at the Termini station in Rome. The historical novel L’architettrice appeared in 2019 and was awarded the Premio Stresa 2020 Sezione Narrativa and the Premio Giuseppe Dessì 2020 Sezione Narrativa. It is the story of Plautilla Bricci, whose dream was to be an architect in 17th-century Rome, a city dominated by such figures as Bernini and Borromini. Her latest work, Fuoco infinito.Tiepolo 1917 (2021), set in Friuli in 1917, is the story of a young History of Art teacher who is given the task to take to safety Tiepolo’s masterpieces and other works of art at risk of being destroyed in the war.

Mazzucco’s books are very emotional. The excellent quality of her material, language, and imagination matches the well elaborated plots, the vivid characters, and the contemporary issues with which she engages. Mazzucco often focuses her interest on women, describing their dreams of freedom, their creativity, their view of themselves and of female identity, something that remains a work in progress. At the very centre of her novels are also the family and intricate webs of relationships, as well as problems that affect human beings in contemporary society.

Compiled by Barbara Kornacka (Poznan)