Biography of Andrea Camilleri

The invention of the language September 6, 1925

Who is Andrea Camilleri?


Born in Porto Empedocle (Agrigento), Andrea Camilleri September 6, 1925 has lived for years in Rome.

Just awarded the baccalaureate and not yet 18 witnesses the landing of the allies in his native Sicily indicated a deep impression. He attended the Academy of dramatic art (in which afterwards will teach directing Institutions) and from 1949 he worked as Director, author and screenwriter, both for television (his famous crime reductions as "Lieutenant Sheridan" and "Maigret") and for the theatre (specifically with works of Pirandello and Beckett).

Strong of this extraordinary experience, he then put his pen at the service of non-fiction, in which field he donated some of the writings and reflections around the topic show.

Over the years has added to these main tasks the most exquisitely creative writer. His debut in this field for the first world war; If the commitment to writing novels is bland, over time it is definitely more intense up to dedicate exclusive attention from when, arising on grounds of age, leaves the job in showbiz. A series of short stories and poems will be worth the Saint Vincent prize.

The success, however, came with the invention of the character of Inspector Montalbano, the main character of the novels that never leave the environments and the Sicilian atmosphere and make no concession to commercial reasons or to a easier to read. In fact, after the "course of things" (1978), passed almost unnoticed in 1980, "a wisp of smoke", the first in a series of novels set in the fictional town of Vigata, straddling the end of 800 and the beginning of ' 900. In all these novels Camilleri shows not only an extraordinary inventiveness, but manages to drop his characters in an environment totally invented and realistic at the same time, creating from scratch a new language, a new "language" (derived from the Sicilian dialect), making it a new G.

The universal affirmation in 1994 only explodes with the appearance of "the hunting season", followed in 1995 "the Brewer of Preston", "granting the phone" and "La mossa del cavallo" (1999).

The television, which he attended in his youth Camilleri prodigandovi great energy, has greatly contributed to the spread of the phenomenon of Sicilian writer, thanks to series dedicated to Mr Salvo Montalbano (played by a Masterful Luca Zingaretti).

A curiosity: his novels of the Sicilian scene were born from personal studies about the history of the island.