Dacia Maraini’s memoir, The Ship for Kobe, features a series of recollections which weave her mother’s diaries written in 1939, when the family embarked for Kobe, Maraini’s own travels with Italian luminaries of the era, such as Fellini, Callas, Moravia, and Pasolini, and the profound experience of the concentration camp for anti-fascists in Nagoya, where the family was deported.

Dacia Maraini was born in Florence in 1936. Her father’s profession as an anthropologist and his antifascist stance led the family to emigrate to Japan where, during the war, they were confined for two years in concentration camps. In 1945 the family returned to Sicily and, when her parents separated in 1954, Dacia moved to Rome with her father.

Maraini’s first two novels, La vacanza (The Holiday) and L’età del malessere (The Age of Indifference), published when she was twenty-six and twenty-seven, were instant international successes: the latter received the editors’ international Formentor prize and was instantly translated into twelve languages. In 1990 Maraini sealed her international success with the publication of the novel La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (The Silent Duchess, Feminist Press, 1992) which stayed on Italy’s bestseller list for almost two years and won the prestigious Premio Campiello (Italy’s equivalent of the us National Book Award). It was published to critical acclaim in fourteen languages.

Several of her books have been made into films, and Maraini has also written screenplays for directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo di Palma, and Margarethe Von Trotta. She is a prolific writer with more than fifty publications of novels, poetry, and plays. She lives in Rome, actively promoting theatre groups, playing a very active role in the literary scene, and speaking on tv and in national newspapers and magazines on the evolving economic and social conditions of Italian and European women.

Vera Golini emigrated with her family to Canada from Abruzzo in 1956. She has been a professor of Italian studies at St. Jerome’s University since 1975, and since 1997 has also directed the Women’s Studies program at the University of Waterloo. She is currently president of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies.

Dacia Maraini's profile page

Genni Gunn is an author, musician and translator. Born in Trieste, she came to Canada as a child. She has published fourteen books: four novels -- The Cipher, Solitaria (longlisted for the Giller Prize), Tracing Iris (made into a film, The Riverbank), and Thrice Upon a Time (finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize); three short story collections -- Permanent Tourists (finalist for the ReLit Prize), Hungers, and On the Road; three poetry collections -- Accidents (finalist for the Di Cicco Poetry Prize), Faceless, and Mating in Captivity (finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award); and a collection of personal essays, Tracks: Journeys in Time and Place (finalist for the CNFC Reader's Choice Award). As well, she has translated from Italian three collections of poems by two renowned Italian authors: Text Me by Corrado Calabro, and Traveling in the Gait of a Fox (finalist for the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri for Literary Translation) and Devour Me Too (finalist for the John Glassco Translation Prize) by Dacia Maraini. Three of Gunn's books have been translated into Italian and Dutch.

As well as books, she has written an opera libretto, Alternate Visions, produced by Chants Libres in 2007 (music by John Oliver), and projected in a simulcast at The Western Front in Vancouver; her poem, "Hot Summer Nights" has been turned into classical vocal music by John Oliver, and performed internationally. Before she turned to writing full-time, Gunn toured Canada extensively with a variety of bands (bass guitar, piano and vocals). Since then, she has performed at hundreds of readings and writers' festivals. Gunn has a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver.

Genni Gunn's profile page