Alessandro Piperno

Origins and early life

Alessandro Piperno was born in 1972 in Rome.

Work and career

He has told his own origins plainly, and this fiche repeats his words: 'I am the child of a mixed marriage — Catholic mother, Jewish father,' and, since Jewish law follows the mother, 'technically I am not Jewish'; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish father, from the Jewish bourgeoisie of Rome, and he has recalled that his paternal grandmother was carrying his father when the Germans raided the Roman ghetto in October 1943.

That inheritance is the very substance of his books: his debut, With the Worst Intentions (2005), a ferocious comedy of a Jewish-Roman family, won the Viareggio and Campiello first-novel prizes. The diptych Persecution and Inseparable followed, and in 2012 Inseparable won the Strega Prize, Italy's most important literary award. A professor of French literature at Rome's Tor Vergata university and an essayist on Proust, he has become one of the sharpest observers of memory, identity and the middle ground between worlds in contemporary Italian letters.