Andrea Bajani is one of the most recognized and award-winning novelists of contemporary Italian and European literature. After his debut with Cordiali saluti (Einaudi, 2005), it was Se consideri le colpe (Einaudi, 2007, If you Kept a Record of Sins, Archipelago, 2021) which brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize.
The New York Times called If you Kept a Record of Sins "an astonishing novel.” For the Publishers Weekly “Bajani brings the full weight of his qualities as a poet, journalist, and professor of European Studies to bear, revealing in finely wrought prose the lasting scars of heartbreak on his characters and the body politic. This is deeply affecting.”
Pulitzer prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri writes: “Andrea Bajani’s haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm”. For Richard Ford “If You Kept a Record of Sins is one of those very strange and compelling novels that never relents in its vision, and forcefully insists, as one of its gifts, that the reader be a part of that vision. It's remarkable.”
With his novel Ogni promessa (Einaudi, 2010; published in English as Every Promise by MacLehose Press), he won the oldest and most prestigious Italian literary award, the Bagutta Prize. His collection of short stories, La vita non è in ordine alfabetico (Einaudi, 2014) won the Settembrini Prize in 2014.
In 2017 he published his first book of poems, Promemoria. The second one, Dimora naturale, was published in 2021. His latest book of poems is L'amore viene prima (2022)
His latest novel, Il libro delle case (Feltrinelli, 2021, The Book of Homes) has been nominated for the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello, and is being published in twenty countries. It is forthcoming in the US with Deep Vellum.
He is the editor of Le storie che raccontiamo (Guanda 2021, The Stories We Tell), a collection of essays about writing, including texts by Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje.
He is also an author of journalistic essays and regularly contributes to the daily newspapers la Repubblica and il manifesto, and to the literary supplement of la Stampa, TTL.
His works have been translated into many languages, and have appeared internationally with publishers such as Gallimard, Archipelago Books, Siruela, Anagrama, MacLehose, Atheneum, dtv, Humanitas, Deep Vellum, Hakusuisha.
His writing has also appeared in the US in Granta, LitHub, McSweeney's, The Believer, and The Massachusetts Review.