Edoardo Albinati

Edoardo Albinati is an Italian novelist, poet, and essayist born in 1956 in Rome. He is a writer of extraordinary ambition and intellectual range, known for tackling difficult moral and psychological terrain with unflinching rigor. He has also worked as a prison teacher at Rome's Rebibbia prison, an experience that has deeply informed his understanding of violence and human nature. Albinati is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. His breakthrough in international terms came with La scuola cattolica (The Catholic School), which won the Premio Strega in 2016. The novel is an immense, 1,200-page work that uses the 1975 Circeo massacre — in which two young men from Rome's bourgeois Catholic school murdered two young women — as a lens through which to examine the moral formation of a generation of upper-middle-class Roman men. The book alternates between direct narrative, digressive essay, and memoir, creating a vast intellectual and moral reckoning with masculinity, privilege, Catholic education, and sexual violence. It was adapted into a multi-part film by director Stefano Mordini in 2021. Albinati is regarded as one of Italy's most challenging and significant writers, a figure who embodies the tradition of the Italian intellectual novel at its most demanding and ambitious.