Paolo Cognetti

Paolo Cognetti is an Italian novelist and essayist born in 1978 in Milan. He grew up in the city but has spent increasing amounts of time in the Alps, and the mountains are central to both his life and his fiction. He has spent summers in a mountain cabin in Valle d'Aosta since adolescence, and this attachment to wild landscape shapes his writing profoundly. Cognetti published several books of short stories before his first novel, and established himself with Sofia si veste sempre di nero (All the Names They Used for God, 2012). His love of the American short story — he has written extensively about Raymond Carver, Herman Melville, and Jack London — is visible in the economy and precision of his prose. Le otto montagne (The Eight Mountains), his 2017 Premio Strega winner, is a novel about friendship between two boys — one from Milan, one from a small mountain village in Piedmont — that spans decades as both men try to find their place in the world. The novel is a quiet masterpiece of friendship, landscape, and masculinity, translated into English by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Le otto montagne was an international sensation, translated into more than thirty languages, adapted into an award-winning film, and winning the Prix Médicis in France. Cognetti is now one of Italy's most internationally celebrated novelists.