In anticipation of the 20th Italian Language Week in the World (October 19-25, 2020), acclaimed Italian writer Beppe Severgnini will present the premiere English book launch of his most recent work, The New Italians with translator Antony Shugaar.
Opening remarks by the Hon. Silvia Chiave, Consul General of Italy in Los Angeles.
Severgnini observed the pandemic as self-revealing, teaching Italians about themselves as individuals and as a collective. Discover his 50 reasons for being Italian, the topic of The New Italians. In this interactive webinar in English, Severgnini will ask participants which reason they would like to discuss together. What’s your reason for being Italian?
A selection of books by Beppe Severgnini is available at Libreria Pino.
Beppe Severgnini is a columnist and an editor at Corriere della Sera, which he joined in 1995. He was the editor-in-chief of its weekly magazine 7, from 2017 to 2019 and he created the blog Italians in 1998. He became a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times in 2013. His writing has appeared in The Financial Times and The Economist, where he was the Italy correspondent from 1996 to 2003.
He is the author of seventeen books, including the American bestsellers Ciao, America! An Italian Discovers the U.S. and La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind. His most recent books are Italiani si rimane (Solferino, Milan 2018), a memoir; and Off the Rail – A Train Trip Through Life (Berkley, New York 2019).
Mr. Severgnini studied law at the University of Pavia. As a foreign correspondent, he was posted in London, Moscow and Washington; he also covered Eastern Europe, China and the Middle East. He teaches at the School of Journalism of the University of Milan, and he has been a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an Isaiah Berlin visiting scholar at Oxford University and a visiting fellow at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
In 2001, Mr. Severgnini was made an Officer of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2011 the president of Italy conferred on him the title of commendatore in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He lives near Milan with his wife and son.
Antony Shugaar is a writer and a translator from the Italian and the French. He’s translated dozens of articles for the New York Review of Books and close to forty novels for Europa Editions. He has translated many novels that were awarded Italy’s highest literary award, the Strega Prize (the 2011 winner, Edoardo Nesi’s Story of My People, Resistance Is Futile, by Walter Siti [2013], Francesco Piccolo’s Wanna Be Like Everyone [2104], Ferocity, by Nicola Lagioia [2015], and the 2016 winner, The Catholic School, by Edoardo Albinati). In the realm of Italian noir, aside from some of the work of Gianfranco Carofiglio, he’s also translated books by many of the leading figures in the field: Massimo Carlotto, Sandrone Dazieri, Maurizio de Giovanni, the late Giorgio Faletti, Antonio Manzini, and others. He’s received two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships. He translated two books in the W. W. Norton Collected Works of Primo Levi, published in 2015. And his translation of Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado was shortlisted for both the PEN and the ALTA Italian translation awards. He has translated TV series and movies for HBO, Netflix, and Amazon.