Beauty and the Inferno Essays

Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano's 2006 expose of the Camorra mafia of Naples, became an international bestseller and was made into an award-winning film. But the death threats that followed also sent him into hiding, from which he is just emerging. Beauty and the Inferno, Saviano's first book since Gomorrah, ranges in subject from his meeting with the real-life Donnie Brasco, to thelegendary South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba; and from sharing the Nobel Academy platform with Salman Rushdie, to life on the run. But present throughout each essay is a sense of Saviano's isolation, which infuses his words with anger, exceptional insight and tragedy.

Roberto Saviano was born in Naples in 1979. As a journalist, he writes for La Repubblica and L’Espresso, as well as for many newspapers around the world. After the publication of Gomorrah (now translated into forty languages) and its subsequent film adaptation, he received several death threats, obliging the Italian government to provide him with twenty-four-hour protection. He has been living in hiding since 2006. In 2011 he was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize.

Oonagh Stransky is the translator of works by Carlo Lucarelli and Giuseppe Pontiggia.