Silk (Baricco) - Author Bio

Author Bio 
• Birth—January 25, 1958
• Where—Turin, Italy
• Education—studied philosophy and piano
• Awards—Prix Medicis Etranger, 1995 (French literary prize
   awarded to a non French author); Viareggio and Palazzo al
   Bosco—both prestigious Italian literary awards.
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy

Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958.  He is the author of two previous novels, Castelli di rabbia, which won the Prix Médicis in France and the Selezione Campiello prize in Italy, and Ocean-Sea, which won the Viareggio and Palazzo del Bosco prizes.  He has also written essays in the field of musicology.  Silk became an immediate bestseller in Italy and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Alessandro Baricco is a popular Italian writer, director, and performer, whose novels have been translated into a wide number of languages.

After receiving degrees in philosophy (under Gianni Vattimo) and piano, he published essays on music criticism: "Il genio in fuga" (1988) on Gioachino Rossini, and "L'anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin" ("Hegel's Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin", 1992) on the relation between music and modernity. He subsequently worked as musical critic for La Repubblica and La Stampa, and hosted talk shows on Rai Tre.

Baricco debuted as a novelist with Castelli di rabbia (translated as Lands of Glass) in 1991. In 1993 he co-founded a creative writing school in Turin, naming it Scuola Holden after J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The Scuola Holden hosts a variety of courses on narrative techniques including screenwriting, journalism, videogames, novels and short stories. In the following years his fame grew enormously throughout Europe, with his works topping the Italian and French best-seller lists. Larger recognition followed the adaptation of his theatrical monologue "Novecento" into the movie The Legend of 1900, directed by Academy Award-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore.

He has also worked with the French band Air, releasing "City Reading", a mix of the band's music with Baricco's reading of his novel City. (From Wikipedia.)