Guiseppe Conte (1945) was born in Imperia, Italy. Poet, novelist, playwright, editor, critic, translator and scholar, he studied at the University of Milan, earning a degree in literature in 1968. Poetry editor of the publisher Guanda, Conte also produced and hosted a special poetry feature series for Italian public television. His poetic writings center around the themes of myth and nature, and find expression in books as La Stagione (The Seasons, 1988), which was awarded the Montale Prize, and Ferite and rifioriture (Wounds and Reflorescences, 2006), for which Conte was the recipient of the Viareggio Prize. Giuseppe Conte’s poetry esceeds the limit of contemporary minimalism by introducing the magical, the solar and the cosmic forces of primeval civilizations in Italian poetry, His novels include Il terzo ufficiale (The Third Officer in Command, 2002), which won the Hemingway Prize. He has translated Blake, Shelly, Whitman and D.H. Lawrence into Italian in his monumental anthologies, La lirica d’Occidente (Western Lyric Poetry) and La poesia del mondo (The Poetry of the World).