Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known by his posthumous nicknames Elagabalus and Heliogabalus, was Roman emperor from 218 to 222, while he was still a teenager. His short reign was notorious for religious controversy and alleged sexual debauchery. A close relative to the Severan dynasty, he came from a prominent Syrian Arab family in Emesa (Homs), Syria, where he served as the head priest of the sun god Elagabal from a young age. After the death of his cousin, the emperor Caracalla, Elagabalus was raised to the principate at 14 years of age in an army revolt instigated by his grandmother Julia Maesa against Caracalla's short-lived successor, Macrinus. He only posthumously became known by the Latinised name of his god.
Secondino Tranquilli, best known by the pseudonym Ignazio Silone, was an Italian politician, novelist, essayist, playwright, and short-story writer, world-famous during World War II for his powerful anti-fascist novels. Considered among the most well-known and read Italian intellectuals in Europe and in the world, his most famous novel, Fontamara, became emblematic for its denunciation of the condition of poverty, injustice, and social oppression of the lower classes, has been translated into numerous languages. From 1946 to 1963, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gabriele Amorth was an Italian Catholic priest of the Paulines and an exorcist for the Diocese of Rome. Amorth, along with five other priests, founded the International Association of Exorcists.
Niccolò Ammaniti is an Italian writer, winner of the Premio Strega in 2007 for As God Commands. He became noted in 2001 with the publication of I'm Not Scared, a novel which was later made into a movie directed by Gabriele Salvatores.
Gabriele Salvatores is an Italian Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter.
Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
Juan Gómez-Jurado is a Spanish journalist and author. He is a columnist in "La Voz de Galicia" and "ABC", distributed in Spain, and he participates in multiple radio and TV programs. His books have been translated into 42 languages and he is one of the most successful living Spanish authors, along with Javier Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. His writing has been described by critics as "energetic and cinematographic".
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
A Good House is the first novel by Canadian writer Bonnie Burnard, published by Picador in 1999 and later by Henry Holt and Company in United States of America. It was the winner of that year's Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel narrates the story of a family in three generations, five houses starting from 1949 until 1997.
The Devil's Advocate is a 1959 novel by Australian author Morris West. It forms part of West's "Vatican" sequence of novels, along with The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), The Clowns of God (1981), and Lazarus (1990).
Roland Merullo is an American author who writes novels, essays and memoir. His best-known works are the novels Breakfast with Buddha, In Revere, In Those Days, A Little Love Story, Revere Beach Boulevard and the memoir Revere Beach Elegy. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, German, Chinese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Czech and Italian.
L'Indice dei libri del mese (L'Indice) is an Italian monthly of cultural information. Founded in 1984, it is one of the longest-running and authoritative in the field. Taking inspiration from internationally renowned book reviews such as The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books, L'Indice offers its readers reviews of books and the arts, and essays on current events and cultural topics starting from the most significant literary and intellectual production in Italian.
The Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales is a quarterly French academic journal of social science established in 1975 by Pierre Bourdieu at the Maison des sciences de l'homme (MSH). It is published by Éditions du Seuil and produced in collaboration with the Centre de sociologie européenne, as well as the Collège de France, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, and the Centre national du livre.
Francesca Valtorta is an Italian actress.
Frederika Randall was an American-Italian translator and journalist. Born in western Pennsylvania, she expatriated to Italy in 1985 at the age of 37. As a journalist, she wrote in both English and Italian for publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Internazionale; from 2000 until her death, she was the Rome correspondent to The Nation. A prolific translator, her works included Confessions of an Italian, considered one of the most important Italian novels of the 19th century.
Giacomo Sartori is an Italian author and agronomist. His day job as a soil scientist has attracted attention for its atypicality and influence on his work. Sartori, who began writing in his thirties, has since published seven novels and four collections of short stories. He is also an editor and columnist of the online literary magazine Nazione Indiana. I Am God, his first novel to be published in English, was translated in 2019 by Frederika Randall and received positive reviews.
We Were Witches is a 2017 novel by Ariel Gore. It is a first-person narrative of a fictionalized version of the author, of her life as a teen mom and budding feminist, from the birth of her daughter when she was 18 years old, to her graduation from Mills College.
A Song for Arbonne is a novel by Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay published in 1992. It is set in a fantasy world with two moons and is loosely based on 12th-century Provence and the Albigensian Crusade.
Monica J. Romano is an Italian activist, writer and politician. She was the first transgender municipal councilor in Milan.
Fumettologica is a news website covering comic book–related news and discussion, considered the most important Italian information source on the topic.
