Authors' Biographies
Alessandro Barbero
Born in Turin in 1959, Alessandro Barbero teaches medieval history and military history at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli. He is the author of four novels, one of which won the Premio Strega (roughly the Italian equivalent of the Booker) in 1996.
Vagabond Voices commissioned the translation of his second title, The Anonymous Novel. It is the view of many Italian critics that this is the best of his works, and should have long since been published in English.
In 2005, the Republic of France awarded Barbero with the title of Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
He continues to publish historical and fiction works faster than this website can keep up with.
Allan Cameron
Born in Watford in 1952, Allan Cameron was brought up in Nigeria and Bangladesh. Having left school at sixteen, he worked at sea for a few years before moving to Italy in his late teens, where he had a variety of jobs. At the age of 31 he went to university and, after graduating, worked in the same department he had studied in. In 1992 he moved to Scotland and worked as a translator (and has now translated some 25 books).
His first novel The Golden Menagerie was published by Luath Press in 2004, and this was followed up in 2005 by The Berlusconi Bonus (also Luath Press), which was translated into Italian and published by Azimut in Rome. Since then Vagabond Voices has republished The Berlusconi Bonus in addition to several others: In Praise of the Garrulous, among the publisher’s series of “Rants”, a selection of poetry entitled Presbyopia, and two collections of short stories, Can the Gods Cry? and On the Heroism of Mortals.
Ermanno Cavazzoni
Born in Reggio Emilia in 1947, Ermanno Cavazzoni teaches poetry and rhetoric at Bologna University, and is the author of several novels. Fellini turned his first novel Il poema dei lunatici (1987) into a film, La voce della luna, which in turn led to the English translation published by Serpent's Tail in 1990 as Voice of the Moon.
Sadly that was the last English translation of a fascinating and prolific author, although other less provincial cultures have continued to translate his works. He followed up this early success with an extraordinarily innovative novel, The Nocturnal Library, which Vagabond Voices has now translated and published almost two decades later.
Cavazzoni admits that his books push the novel to its very limits - "like outpourings of the maniacal," he says. "That's how they come to me, you must understand."
Chris Dolan
Chris Dolan writes for page, stage and screen. An early short story won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Competition, and Poor Angels and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award in 1995. A second collection of stories, Hour After Hour, was published in 2008. Other stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio. His first novel, Ascension Day, won the McKitterick Prize.
His non-fiction books include An Anarchist’s Story: The Life of Ethel Macdonald and John Lennon: The Original Beatle. He broadcasts regularly on TV and radio.
Winner of an Edinburgh Fringe First, he has written several plays, performed internationally, including the only stage adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Dolan has written extensively for radio and television, both drama and documentary, including An Anarchist's Story, and a history of poor whites in the Caribbean, Barbado’ed (both BBC). He is also a published poet, a columnist, and teacher.
Nicol Ljubic
Born in Zagreb in 1947 the son of an aeornautics engineer, Nicol Ljubic was brought up in Sweden, Greece, Russia and Germany, and studied politics at university. He now lives in Berlin and works as a writer and freelance journalist.
Ljubic won the Hansel-Mieth Prize and the Theodor Wolff Prize for his journalism and Stillness of the Sea has won him the Adelbert von Chamisso Promotional Prize and the Verdi Prize for Literature.
Renzo Llorente
Renzo Llorente was born in Brunswick, Maine (USA) in 1965. Since 1998 he has lived in Madrid, where he teaches philosophy on Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus. Llorente’s academic research centres on issues in social philosophy, ethics, and Latin American philosophy, and he is the author of numerous scholarly papers in these and other areas. Llorente is currently working on a study of the moral foundations of Marxism, and preparing an anthology of writings in translation by the Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui.
Gregory Norminton
Gregory Norminton was born in Berkshire in 1976, of Franco-Belgo-Irish parentage. He was educated at Wellington College and studied English at Oxford University, before studying drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. The “profession” of actor allowed him to devote his entire time to writing and his first novel, The Ship of Fools, was published by Sceptre in 2002. It was followed in 2004 by Arts and Wonders, for which he was awarded an Arts Council Writers Award. Following a brief spell in the American Midwest, he wrote a third novel, Ghost Portrait, which was published in 2005, when he also took part in a conservation-themed television series, Planet Action, which was filmed in Panama, Belize, Malaysia and Cambodia.G
Gregory Norminton moved to Edinburgh in 2007, where he finished a fourth novel, Serious Things, which was published to great acclaim and derisory sales in 2008. In 2010 he married the dedicatee of this book of aphorisms. In 2011 he took up a lectureship in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
As well as writing novels, Gregory Norminton has translated Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, published short stories, written plays for radio and appeared several times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. He is also editing a collection of original fiction by major UK authors, Out of Chaos – stories for our shared planet, which will be published by Oneworld in 2013.
His website is www.gregorynorminton.co.uk
Allan Massie
Allan Massie is the author of twenty novels and a dozen non-fiction books. His six novels about the Roman Empire have been widely translated, and have been particularly successful in Brazil. Gore Vidal has defined him as a "master of the long-ago historical novel". His twentieth century novels have been compared by French critics to Balzac and Stendhal, by Muriel Spark to Thomas Mann, and by others to Evelyn Waugh. He thinks such comparisons as pleasing as they are ridiculously exaggerated. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and has been given an honorary doctorate by Strathclyde University.
The Sins of the Father: “A marvellous read, dealing with big themes in an original and striking way” - Nicholas Mosley, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
Luciano Mecacci
Luciano Mecacci (born 1946) is professor of psychology at Florence University, and has written widely in his field, although his particular expertise is psychophysiology and the history of psychology. He has worked in Russia and France, and his books have been translated into English, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and German. In 2000 he recieved the Minguzzi Prize for his contribution to psychology, and in 2005 he received an honorary degree from Lima University.
Les Wilson
Les Wilson is a writer, journalist and award-winning documentary film-maker. His university was an early career in regional and evening newspapers, and an overland journey to India. He became an on-screen reporter on Scottish Television's nightly news programme and later the editor of the channel's political programme, Ways and Means. It was in this role that he witnessed the vote of confidence that brought down Callaghan's government and led to the Thatcher one in 1979. Although his work has taken him to six continents and challenging locations like Chernobyl and Southern Sudan, he still believes that night in Westminster to have been the most remarkable scene he has ever witnessed.
As a documentary-maker, he has directed several films and his "political" documentaries include The Englishing of Scotland, Independence Day and, in Gaelic, Diomhair (Secret). He is the co-author of Scotland's War, based on a 30-part documentary series he directed. Fire in the Head is his first published novel.