The Imaginary Life of a Laurel Tree

Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L'Espresso. More recently he has worked as a columnist for the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He has also served as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In addition to writing novels such as South (Other Press, 2023), a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.

Michael F. Moore is the award-winning translator, most recently, of The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, hailed as a landmark literary event. His translations range from twentieth-century classics--Agostino by Alberto Moravia and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi--to contemporary novels, including Live Bait, by Fabio Genovesi. Moore is the former chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and has a PhD in Italian from New York University. For many years he was also an interpreter at the United Nations and a full-time staff member of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations.