Mario Desiati

Mario Desiati is an Italian novelist born in 1977 in Locorotondo, Puglia. He is the author of several novels that explore themes of sexuality, identity, migration, and the tensions between the South and North of Italy. He worked for many years as an editor at the publisher Fandango and has been an important figure in Italian literary publishing. Desiati's earlier novels include Neppure quando è notte (2003), Il paese delle spose infelici (2008), and Ternitti (2011). His fiction is characterized by a lush, sensory prose style rooted in the landscape and culture of Puglia, and by an honest engagement with queer experience and desire. Spatriati (Strangers to Ourselves), his 2022 Premio Strega winner, follows two young Pugliese people — a man and a woman — across decades and across Europe, exploring their complex, shifting relationship and what it means to be perpetually displaced, never quite at home. The novel is both an intimate story of friendship and desire and a reflection on what it means to be Italian in Europe. Desiati is one of the most prominent writers of his generation in Italy, known for the sincerity and emotional honesty of his fiction and for his willingness to bring queer experience into the mainstream of Italian literary life.