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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Beauty and the Inferno

Beauty and the Inferno

Formidably courageous investigative journalist Roberto Saviano is best known for his work on the Italian mafia, but Beauty and the Inferno, winner of the European Book Award 2010, also tackles universal themes with great insight and humanity, with urgency, and often with anger.

This important collection includes essays across a remarkably wide field of interests, celebrating personal heroes as diverse as Frank Miller and Lionel Messi, Salman Rushdie and Anna Politkovskaya.

However as with the bestselling Gomorrah, his fearless and unflinching condemnation of the mafia takes centre stage. Implicit in Saviano’s tributes to writers, musicians, sportsmen and journalists is the message that there is an alternative to living in corruption and fear.

Beauty and the Inferno is a searing polemic that encompasses Saviano’s vision of life and of art, of the good to be found in humanity and the evil inherent in power. His commitment to truth resonates from every page.

‘A sad book in many ways because it illustrates the price that can be paid for courageous writing’
Guardian

 

Author

Roberto Saviano

Roberto Saviano

Books

Beauty and the Inferno

Roberto Saviano was born in 1979 in Casal di Principe, a Mafia stronghold in Naples. He grew up in a middle-class household – his father Luigi was a doctor, and his mother Miriam a teacher. Saviano’s first experience of the Mafia came during his youth, when his father rushed a young Camorra (Neapolitan Mafia) victim to hospital, against Mafia protocol (victims are supposed to be left to die). Luigi was later severely beaten in retribution.

Years on, Saviano himself enraged the Mafia with the publication of his carefully researched Gomorrah (2006), an expose of Camorra. The Camorra immediately issued him with a death sentence. He was given a round-the-clock police guard and was forced to move constantly. Despite the huge success of the novel – Gomorrah has sold millions of copies, won a number of high-profile literary awards, and spawned a widely-acclaimed film adaptation in 2008 – Saviano is forced to live in exile, unable to make public appearances in Italy and faced with continued death threats.

Translator

Oonagh Stransky

Oonagh Stransky

Books

Beauty and the Inferno

Oonagh Stransky was born in Paris and now resides in New York City. She grew up in the Middle East and in London, and attended Mills College and UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, Universita’ di Firenze, and Columbia University. She teaches English in a performing arts high school in New York.

Stransky has been a board member of the American Literary Translators Association since 2003. Her translations of Born Twice and Day After Day were both nominated for the Dublin Impac Award and Almost Blue won the Booksense 76 Award in 2000.

Published by

The MacLehose Press, 2011
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Formidably courageous investigative journalist Roberto Saviano is best known for his work on the Italian mafia, but Beauty and the Inferno, winner of the European Book Award 2010, also tackles universal themes with great insight and humanity, with urgency, and often with anger.

This important collection includes essays across a remarkably wide field of interests, celebrating personal heroes as diverse as Frank Miller and Lionel Messi, Salman Rushdie and Anna Politkovskaya.

However as with the bestselling Gomorrah, his fearless and unflinching condemnation of the mafia takes centre stage. Implicit in Saviano’s tributes to writers, musicians, sportsmen and journalists is the message that there is an alternative to living in corruption and fear.

Beauty and the Inferno is a searing polemic that encompasses Saviano’s vision of life and of art, of the good to be found in humanity and the evil inherent in power. His commitment to truth resonates from every page.

‘A sad book in many ways because it illustrates the price that can be paid for courageous writing’
Guardian

 

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