WriterPatrizia Cavalli

Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and lives in Rome. Since 1974, she has published five volumes of poetry with Einaudi, including Sempre aperto teatro, 1999 (Theatre Always Open) which won the prestigious Premio Viareggio Repaci and Pigre divinità e pigra sorte, 2006 (Lazy Gods and Lazy Fate) for which she received the Premio Internazionale Pasolini. Bilingual editions of her poems have been published in France, Canada, Mexico, and Germany. She has contributed to numerous magazines and reviews, including Poetry and The New Yorker. Describing her work in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Verse (1996), J.D. McClatchy observed “her style is hard-bitten, on the edge. The circumstances of a poem, although private, are never merely personal, they reach out to larger, more abiding and vulnerable realities.” Giorgio Agamben has characterized her verses as “a prosody…expressed in the most fluent, seamless, and colloquial language of 20th century Italian poetry.” Cavalli also has translated Moliere’s Amphytrion, Wilde’s Salome, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Othello.