Tim Parks

(Manchester, 1954) grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Since 1981 he has lived in Italy, where he teaches literary translation at IULM university, Milan. He is the author of fourteen novels including Europa (1997) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A corrosive exposé of EC hypocrisy, Europa is narrated by savagely unhappy Jerry Marlowe who, together with his former mistress and a bus full of feckless colleagues and students, under­takes a journey to Strasbourg to petition to save a job that Jerry does not believe in. In the 1990s Parks wrote two personal accounts of life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education (published in the Netherlands in 2002,), and some years later A Season with Verona, which set out to describe Italy through the way the country engages with football. All three books achieve an exhilarating anthropological precision while the narrative voice oscillates between an insider’s and an outsider’s point of view. His most recent book, Teach Us To Sit Still, is the thought-provoking and highly entertaining story of the author's quest to overcome ill health. Parks has also translated works by Machiavelli, Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso and writes regularly on translation issues. His Translating Style, an analysis of Italian translations of English modernists is used as teaching material in a number of universities. Parks also publishes in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.