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Antonio Tabucchi (; 24 September 1943 – 25 March 2012) was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy. Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that when he returned to Italy, he took an introductory course in Portuguese for a better comprehension of the poet.
His books and essays have been translated in 18 countries. Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer. Tabucchi was awarded the French prize "Médicis étranger" for Indian Nocturne ( Notturno indiano) and the premio Campiello, and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira. In later life, he was mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a feat he never achieved.
A visit to Lisbon sparked his love of the city of the fado and of that country as a whole. As a result, he graduated in 1969 with a thesis on "Surrealism in Portugal". He specialized at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in the seventies and in 1973 he was appointed as a teacher of Portuguese Language and Literature in Bologna. That year, he wrote his first novel, Piazza d'Italia (Bompiani 1975), in which he tried to describe history from the losers' point of view, in this case, the Tuscan anarchists, in the tradition of great Italian writers of a more or less recent past, such as Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Beppe Fenoglio, and contemporary authors, like Vincenzo Consolo.
In 1987, when I volatili del Beato Angelico and Pessoana Minima were published, he received France's Prix Médicis for best foreign novel (Notturno indiano). The next year he wrote the comedy I dialoghi mancati. The President of Portugal appointed him the title Do Infante Dom Henrique in 1989, and that same year the French government named him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Tabucchi published Un baule pieno di gente. Scritti su Fernando Pessoa (Feltrinelli) in 1990, and the next year, L'angelo nero (1991). In 1991 he wrote in Portuguese , a novel later translated into Italian (winner of Premio P.E.N. Club italiano) and he published Sogni di sogni.
In 1994 he released Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, as well as the novel that brought him the most recognition: Sostiene Pereira, winner of the Prizes Super Campiello, Scanno and Jean Monnet for European Literature. The protagonist of this novel becomes the symbol of the defence of freedom for information for the political opponents of all anti-democratic regimes. In Italy, during the election campaign, the opposition against the controversial communication magnate Silvio Berlusconi aggregated around this book. The director Roberto Faenza drew from it the eponymous film (1995) in which he cast Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and Daniel Auteuil as Dr. Cardoso.
In 1997 Tabucchi wrote the novel The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro ( La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro) based on the true story of a man whose headless corpse was found in a park. It was discovered that the man had been murdered in a police station of the Republican National Guard (GNR). The news story struck the writer's sensitivity and imagination. The event's setting in Porto also gave the author the opportunity to show his love for the city. In order to finish this novel, Tabucchi worked on the documents gathered by the investigators at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg who enforce civil rights and the conditions of detention in Europe, including the relationship between citizens and police. The novel proved prophetic when police Sergeant José dos Santos later confessed to the murder, was convicted and sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment. Also in 1997, Tabucchi wrote Marconi, se ben mi ricordo, followed the next year by L'Automobile, la Nostalgie et l'Infini (1998). That year the Leibniz Academy awarded him the Prize Nossack.
He wrote Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento and Ena poukamiso gemato likedes ( Una camicia piena di macchie. Conversazioni di A.T. con Anteos Chrysostomidis) in 1999. In 2001 Tabucchi published the epistolary novel, Si sta facendo sempre più tardi (English translation, 2006: It's Getting Later All the Time). In it, 17 letters which celebrate the triumph of the word, which like "messages in the bottle", have no addressee, they are missives the author addressed to an "unknown poste restante". The book received the 2002 Prize France Culture (the French cultural radio) for foreign literature.
He used to spend six months of the year in Lisbon, with his wife, a native of the city, and their two children. The rest of the year he spent in Tuscany, where he taught Portuguese literature at the University of Siena. Tabucchi considered himself a writer only in an ontological sense because from the existential point of view, he was glad to define himself as a "university professor". For Tabucchi, literature was not a profession, "but something that involves desires, dreams and imagination". Antonio Tabucchi, un dubitatore impegnato. Interview by Asbel Lopez. Tabucchi regularly contributed articles to the cultural pages of the newspapers Corriere della Sera and El País.
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