ELIO PECORA

ELIO PECORA, one of the most remarkable contemporary Italian poets, was born in Sant’Arsenio (close to Salerno) in 1936. In 1966 he moved to Rome where he has been living ever since. Throughout the years, he has published twenty volumes of poetry, most of them being awarded prestigious Italian poetry prizes, as well as a series of volumes of poems for children. During the interval 1980-2013 he published five landmark anthologies of 20th century Italian poetry, in addition to an anthology of contemporary poems dedicated to primary school pupils. His vast activity as a literary critic and theorist has been crystallized not only in a large number of articles and reviews published in the most highly valued Italian journals, but also in several monographs dedicated either to some contemporary poets (he has contributed unparalleled insights into the work of Sandro Penna) or to some literary issues worthy of debate. His dramatic texts have been either staged (especially in Rome, Crotona, Brescia) or broadcast on the national Italian radio stations. His poems have been translated into numerous languages, being published in volume in Portuguese-speaking and Dutch-speaking countries, as well as in Anglophone and Francophone ones.

In 2017 he was rewarded with the title “Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic” for his prodigious literary activity.