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Tim Parks | |
|---|---|
 Parks in Arezzo in 2019 | |
| Born | Timothy Harold Parks 19 December 1954 Manchester, England, UK |
| Alma mater | Downing College, Cambridge Harvard University |
| Period | 1985–present |
| Notable works | Europa , Destiny, Teach Us to Sit Still, In Extremis |
| Spouse | Rita Baldassarre (m. 1979;div. 2017) |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | |
| Official website | |
Timothy Harold Parks (born 19 December 1954) is a British novelist, author of nonfiction, translator from Italian to English, and professor of literature.
Parks was born in Manchester, the son of Harold Parks, an Anglican vicar and missionary, and his wife Joan. [1] [2] He grew up in Finchley, and was educated at Westminster City School and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English. [1] [2] Following graduation in 1977 he spent a further period at Harvard University studying for a doctorate, which he did not complete. [1] [3] During his time in the United States, he wrote introductions for the dramatisations of novels on behalf of the Boston public radio station WGBH. [4] Upon returning to Europe, Parks was employed initially as a marketing executive for a translation company before working as a freelance translator and teacher in Verona. From 1985 to 1992 he was a lecturer at the University of Verona. He was made a Visiting Lecturer at the Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne in Milan (now known as IULM University) in 1992, and from 2005 to 2019 was an Associate Professor there. [2]
Parks is the author of twenty novels (notably Europa , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997). His first novel, Tongues of Flame, won both the Betty Trask Award [5] and Somerset Maugham Award in 1986. [6] In the same year, Parks was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Loving Roger. [7] Other highly praised titles were Shear, Destiny, Judge Savage, Cleaver, and In Extremis. He has also published short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere. [8]
Since the 1990s Parks has written frequently for the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books and has published nonfiction books, including A Season with Verona, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and Teach Us to Sit Still, shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.
Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, and Fleur Jaeggy. His nonfiction book Translating Style was described as "canonical in the field of translation studies". [9] He twice won the John Florio Prize for translations from the Italian. In 2011 he co-curated the exhibition Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and a book of the same title, edited by Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, was published in 2012 by Giunti. ISBN 978-8809767645. The exhibition was loosely based on Parks' book Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence.
Parks married Rita Baldassarre in 1979 [10] and moved to Italy shortly thereafter. The couple have three children. They divorced in 2017.[ citation needed ] In 2021 he married Eleonora Gallitelli.[ citation needed ]
Tim Parks' own bibliography is at his website. [11]
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Antonio Tabucchi 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.
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.
Roberto Calasso was an Italian writer and publisher. Apart from his mother tongue, Calasso was fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, Latin and ancient Greek. He also studied Sanskrit. He has been called "a literary institution of one". The fundamental thematic concept of his œuvre is the relationship between myth and the emergence of modern consciousness.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Marcovaldo is a collection of 20 short stories written by Italo Calvino. It was initially published, in 1963, as Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città. The first stories were written in the early 1950s.
John Fuller FRSL is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.
George Duncan Painter OBE, known as George D. Painter, was an English author most famous as a biographer of Marcel Proust.
Tim Butcher is an English author, broadcaster and journalist. He is the author of Blood River (2007), Chasing the Devil (2010) and The Trigger (2014), travel books blending contemporary adventure with history.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. Since 2006 he has taught creative writing and literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where he is Distinguished Professor of English.
Fleur Jaeggy is a Swiss author who writes in Italian. TheTimes Literary Supplement named her work Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year upon its US publication, and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo. As of 2021, six of her books have been translated into English.
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is an annual literary prize for any book-length translation into English from any other living European language. The first prize was awarded in 1999. The prize is funded by and named in honour of Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen's College and St Anne's College, Oxford.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
The John Florio Prize for Italian translation is awarded by the Society of Authors, with the co-sponsorship of the Italian Cultural Institute and Arts Council England. Named after the Tudor Anglo-Italian writer-translator John Florio, the prize was established in 1963. As of 1980 it is awarded biannually for the best English translation of a full-length work of literary merit and general interest from Italian.
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.
Richard Dixon is an English translator of Italian literature. He translated the last works of Umberto Eco, including his novels The Prague Cemetery, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012, and Numero Zero, commended by the judges of the John Florio Prize, 2016. He has also translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Roberto Calasso and Antonio Moresco.
