Italian · b. 1958
Baricco took degrees in philosophy and piano, wrote music criticism on Rossini and Adorno, and presented television programmes about opera before turning to fiction. His novels are short, patterned and rhythmically obsessive, built from repeated sentences that behave like musical phrases. Silk sold over a million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages. Novecento, a monologue about a pianist born on an ocean liner who never sets foot on land, became Tornatore's film The Legend of 1900. In 1994 he co-founded the Holden School in Turin, a writing academy named for Salinger's narrator, which has trained a generation of Italian writers and irritated another. He has also directed a film, adapted Homer for public reading, and written a widely argued essay on how the internet changed what culture is.