Erri De Luca

Erri De Luca (b. 1950, Naples) is an Italian novelist, poet, and translator whose work draws together the oral tradition of the Neapolitan popular world, the cadences of the Hebrew Bible, and the weight of a life shaped by physical labor and political engagement. Born Enrico De Luca into a bourgeois family ruined by the war, he grew up in the densely populated Naples neighborhood of Montedidio and left the city at eighteen. His books — more than sixty, translated into over thirty languages — are written in a spare, precise Italian inflected by deep immersion in ancient texts.

After leaving Naples, De Luca was a member of Lotta Continua, the Italian far-left organization active through the 1970s. For roughly two decades he worked as a manual laborer — on construction sites, in warehouses, operating cranes — experience that has left in his prose a precise attention to the body's relationship to weight, effort, and material resistance. He taught himself Ancient Hebrew and Yiddish and has translated several books of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, a practice that shaped the rhythms and economy of his own writing. His first novel, Non ora, non qui (Not Here, Not Now), appeared in 1989, when he was thirty-nine. The books that followed — Aceto, arcobaleno (1992), Tre cavalli (Three Horses, 1999), Montedidio (God's Mountain, 2002), Il peso della farfalla (The Weight of the Butterfly, 2009) — return consistently to Naples, to the biblical, and to the ethics of action in situations of injustice.

He received the France Culture Prize in 1994, the Prix Femina Étranger in 2002 for Montedidio, the Petrarch Prize in Germany in 2010, and the European Prize for Literature in 2013. In 2015, following a trial in which he was accused of inciting sabotage of the Lyon-Turin high-speed rail line, he was acquitted. A mountaineer as well as a writer, De Luca continues to publish, and his work remains among the most widely read Italian literature of the past four decades.