Raffaele La Capria

Raffaele La Capria (3 October 1922 – 26 June 2022) was an Italian novelist and screenwriter. His second novel, The Mortal Wound (Ferito a morte), won Italy's most prestigious award, the Strega Prize, and is today considered a classic of Italian literature. Sandro Veronesi referred to it as "the best Italian novel of all time". Biography La Capria was born in Naples, where he was to spend the formative years of his life. There he graduated in law, before staying in France, England, and the United States and then settling in Rome. He contributed to the cultural pages of the Corriere della Sera and was co-director of the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti. A particular interest was English poetry of the 1930s: as well as writing numerous articles he translated works including T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. In the 1950s he wrote and produced a number of radio programmes for RAI on foreign contemporary drama. In 1957 La Capria was invited to participate in the International Seminar of Literature at Harvard University. In 1961 his novel Ferito a morte won the prestigious Premio Strega. La Capria worked as co-scriptwriter on a number of Francesco Rosi's films, including Le mani sulla città (1963), Uomini contro (1970), and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1979). In September 2001 he received a Premio Campiello lifetime achievement award and in 2005 L'estro quotidiano was selected as the winner of the Viareggio Prize for fiction.