Biography of Giuseppe Cafiero
He lives in the Tuscan countryside, in Lucignano, in the province of Arezzo, Italy.
He was born in Naples. His childhood was spent in various Italian cities. In Bologna he began to frequent intellectual circles in the renowned bookstore “Palma Verde”, owned by Roberto Roversi. It was in one of the first magazines published by this cultural center that the first part of the book “James Joyce – Rome and other stories” appeared.
He then worked for several radio production companies, especially Radio Capodistria, and also for the radio of Italian Switzerland, so he moved to Tuscany, where he has finally been able to devote himself to reading and also to writing.
His main literary influence has been Calvino, a writer of extraordinary literary subtlety and intellectual intelligence. Giuseppe Cafiero continually reads Jorge Luis Borges, another sublime and inimitable author.
Giuseppe Cafiero has produced reeditions, free adaptations, reductions for radio, translations from French.
The spectrum of names is wide, from William Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill, from Rudolf Erich Raspe to Alphonse Daudet, from Ernst Toller to Bertolt Brecht. He has written for theater and radio, collaborating also with RAI, Sveriges Radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
But his strongest point is “bio-fiction”, such as his books “Joyce in Rome”, another one he published in 2008 about Vincent Van Gogh, and one more about Gustave Flaubert in 2010. All three characters are revolutionaries in their own fields. Van Gogh, with that explosion of colors of extraordinary beauty. Joyce, who broke with the literary realism of the 1800s.
Hence his books have a great command of the language of his characters, thanks to his experience writing for radio. This is the case of the program that Giuseppe Cafiero wrote called “James Joyce in una notte in Valpurga”, in 1990, after which he finished the novel narration of Joyce’s stay in Rome in 1906 and 1907.
This same text was translated into Spanish, with the title “Los fantasmas de Joyce”, and edited in 2013. The following year it was adapted for theater and premiered in Buenos Aires, Argentina under the title “Ánima Joyce”.
The dissemination of his work in Spanish continued intensively; in 2014 his novels “Vincent Van Gogh o la ambigüedad de la locura” and “Edgar Allan Poe o la ambigüedad de la muerte” were published by TSDL in e-book format.
His play “L’inserzione”, which deals with the appropriation of children as spoils of war, caused repercussions. It is practically a monologue starring the adoptive mother of the child in question. It was translated into Spanish and edited under the title “El aviso”, and is its most recent world premiere in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was directed and staged by Mariano Terré.
