Claudio Magris

Claudio Magris was born in 1939 in Trieste, a cosmopolitan port city, ruled by the Habsburgs for centuries until it was ceded to Italy. He was educated at the University of Trieste and after studies in German universities, he taught at the University of Trieste and at the University of Turin. His dissertation, Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (1963), about the Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature, Magris finished at the age of 24. Since 1978 Magris has worked as Professor of German Literature at the University of Trieste. From 1994 to 1996 he was a member of the Senate in the XIIth legislature of the Republic of Italy. In 2001 he was appointed to a Chair at the Collège de France.

Magris has also translated into Italy works by Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Büchner and Grillparzer, and written essays and critical studies on such writers as Borges, Wilhelm Heinse, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ibsen, Kafka, Musil, Rilke, and Joseph Roth. Magris's work have appeared in several European newspapers and magazines, including Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading national daily.

Magris's first novel was Inferences on a Sabre (1984), about a battalion of Cossac fighters, who collaborated with the Nazis in northeastern Italy during World War II. His other prose works and works for the theatre include the novels Un altro mare (1991) and Alla cieca (2005), and the plays Stadelmann (1988), Le Voci (1999), and La mostra (2001). Magris's essays from 1974 to 1998, dealing mostly central and eastern European themes, were published in Utopia e disincanto.