Alessandro Baricco is a popular Italian writer, director, and performer. His novels have been translated into a wide number of languages, and include Lands of Glass, Silk, Ocean Sea, City, and Without Blood. His theatrical monologue, Novecento, was adapted into film, titled The Legend of 1900. He currently lives in Rome with his wife and two sons.

Tommaso Pincio, pseudonimo di Marco Colapietro, è uno scrittore italiano. Il suo pseudonimo è la traslitterazione italiana del nome dello scrittore postmoderno Thomas Pynchon. Dopo aver frequentato l'Accademia delle Belle Arti, ha esordito come fumettista, ha diretto per dieci anni una galleria d'arte internazionale e vissuto tra la fine degli '80 e l'inizio dei '90 a New York come assistente di un famoso pittore; è in questo periodo che ha cominciato ad approcciarsi alla scrittura. Ha esordito come romanziere nel 1999 con M.. Successivamente ha pubblicato Lo spazio sfinito (2000) e Un amore dell'altro mondo (2002), un libro che ha diviso la critica letteraria e con il quale l'autore ha acquistato una certa notorietà. Vi si narra la vita di Kurt Cobain, leader del gruppo rock Nirvana, attraverso lo sguardo di un suo amico immaginario. La ragazza che non era lei, pubblicato nel 2005, traccia un bilancio su ciò che è andato perduto e ciò che è rimasto dei sogni di amore e libertà degli anni Sessanta. È invece del 2006 Gli alieni, un'indagine su come l'ipotesi dell'esistenza di civiltà extraterrestri sia diventata uno dei grandi miti dell'era moderna. Di più recente pubblicazione è il quinto romanzo dell'autore, Cinacittà. Tommaso Pincio collabora regolarmente alla rivista Rolling Stone e alle pagine culturali de la Repubblica e il manifesto, occupandosi perlopiù di letteratura statunitense.

Gianrico Carofiglio (born 1961) is a novelist and former anti-Mafia judge in the Italian city of Bari. His debut novel, Involuntary Witness, was published in 2002 and translated into English in 2005 by Patrick Creagh and published by the Bitter Lemon Press, and has been adapted as the basis for a popular television series in Italy. The subsequent novels were translated by Howard Curtis. Carofiglio won the 2005 Premio Bancarella award for his novel "Il passato è una terra straniera". He is also Honorary President of The Edinburgh Gadda Prize which celebrates the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda. The Past is a Foreign Country is the English language title of the 2004 novel Il passato è una terra straniera. It won the 2005 Premio Bancarella literary award. It has been translated into English.

Andrea Camilleri (born september 6, 1925 in Porto Empedocle) was an Italian writer. He is considered one of the greatest Italian writers of both 20th and 21st centuries. Originally from Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri began studies at the Faculty of Literature in 1944, without concluding them, meanwhile publishing poems and short stories. Around this time he joined the Italian Communist Party. From 1948 to 1950 Camilleri studied stage and film direction at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts, and began to take on work as a director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and Beckett. As a matter of fact, his parents knew Pirandello and were even distant friends, as he tells in his essay on Pirandello "Biography of the changed son". His most famous works, the Montalbano series show many pirandellian elements: for example, the wild olive tree that helps Montalbano think, is on stage in his late work "The giants of the mountain" With RAI, Camilleri worked on several TV productions, such as Inspector Maigret with Gino Cervi. In 1977 he returned to the Academy of Dramatic Arts, holding the chair of Movie Direction, and occupying it for 20 years. In 1978 Camilleri wrote his first novel Il Corso Delle Cose ("The Way Things Go"). This was followed by Un Filo di Fumo ("A Thread of Smoke") in 1980. Neither of these works enjoyed any significant amount of popularity. In 1992, after a long pause of 12 years, Camilleri once more took up novel-writing. A new book, La Stagione della Caccia ("The Hunting Season") turned out to be a best-seller. In 1994 Camilleri published the first in a long series of novels: La forma dell'Acqua (The Shape of Water) featured the character of Inspector Montalbano, a fractious Sicilian detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town. The series is written in Italian but with a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar. The name Montalbano is an homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán; the similarities between Montalban's Pepe Carvalho and Camilleri's fictional detective are remarkable. Both writers make great play of their protagonists' gastronomic preferences. This feature provides an interesting quirk which has become something of a fad among his readership even in mainland Italy. The TV adaptation of Montalbano's adventures, starring the perfectly-cast Luca Zingaretti, further increased Camilleri's popularity to such a point that in 2003 Camilleri's home town, Porto Empedocle - on which Vigàta is modelled - took the extraordinary step of changing its official denomination to that of Porto Empedocle Vigàta, no doubt with an eye to capitalising on the tourism possibilities thrown up by the author's work. In 1998 Camilleri won the Nino Martoglio International Book Award. Camilleri lived in Rome where he worked as a TV and theatre director. About 10 million copies of his novels have been sold to date, and are becoming increasingly popular in the UK and North America. In addition to the degree of popularity brought him by the novels, in recent months Andrea Camilleri has become even more of a media icon thanks to the parodies aired on an RAI radio show, where popular comedian, TV-host and impression artist Fiorello presents him as a raspy voiced, caustic character, madly in love with cigarettes and smoking (Camilleri is well-known for his love of tobacco). He received an honorary degree from University of Pisa in 2005.