Diego Marani (born 1959) is an Italian novelist and European civil servant.

Biography

Born in Tresigallo, Marani attended the Liceo Ginnasio Ariosto in

Ferrara Ferrara (; ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy, capital of the province of Ferrara. it had 132,009 inhabitants. It is situated northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main ...

till 1978 and graduated in interpretation and translation from the ''Scuola superiore di lingue moderne per traduttori e interpreti'' in

Trieste Trieste ( , ; ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital and largest city of the Regions of Italy#Autonomous regions with special statute, autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as well as of the Province of Trieste, ...

in 1983. Upon graduation, he worked as a freelance interpreter and translator as well as a freelance journalist for various local newspapers. Besides English and French, he later studied professionally Dutch, Finnish, Slovene and German languages.CV
on LinkedIn In 1985 Marani started working at the EU Council (DGT) as a translator and revisor, a position he maintained until 2006, when he joined the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

's Directorate-General for Culture, and from 2010 the Directorate-General for Interpretation, working in particular on multilingualism policy, support to literary translation, lifelong learning and early language learning. In this period he also served as speechwriter for

Leonard Orban Leonard Orban (born 28 June 1961) is a Romanian independent technocrat who served as the Commissioner for Multilingualism in the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (EU). He was responsible for the EU language policy ...

Manuel Barroso Manuel Barroso (born 9 June 1964) is a Portuguese modern pentathlete. He competed at the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996 Summer Olympics The 1996 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, also known as Atlanta 1996 and commonl ...

Antonio Tajani Antonio Tajani (; born 4 August 1953) is an Italian politician who has been serving as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Foreign Affairs since 22 October 2022. He served as President of the Europe ...

Androulla Vassiliou Androulla Vassiliou (; born 30 November 1943) is a Cypriot and European politician. Between March 2008 and February 2010, she was the European Commissioner for Health, and then, until November 2014, the European Commissioner for Education, Cu ...

. In 2014 he served as adviser to the Minister of Culture

Dario Franceschini Dario Franceschini (; born 19 October 1958) is an Italian lawyer, writer, and politician, member of the Democratic Party (PD), of which he briefly became leader in 2009. Franceschini served as Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities and ...

during the Italian Presidency of the EU Council. Since 2015 Marani has worked for the

European External Action Service The European External Action Service (EEAS) is the diplomatic service in charge of executing all Foreign relations of the European Union, international relations of the European Union. The EEAS is led by the Vice-President of the European Co ...

, coordinating cultural diplomacy initiatives. In 1996, while working as a

translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''trans ...

for the

Council of the European Union The Council of the European Union, often referred to in the treaties and other official documents simply as the Council, and less formally known as the Council of Ministers, is the third of the seven institutions of the European Union (EU) a ...

, he invented

Europanto Europanto is a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from European languages of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani (a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Bruss ...

, a mock

international auxiliary language An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a ...

. Marani has published different articles, short stories and video clips in Europanto. Marani is also an essayist and novelist. His most famous novel, '' New Finnish Grammar'' (''Nuova grammatica finlandese''), has been translated into several languages and has received the Grinzane Cavour literary prize in Italy. His other novels include ''Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot'' (1998, written in Europanto), ''L'ultimo dei Vostiach'' (Premio Campiello, Selezione Giurati) ('' The Last of the Vostiaks''), ''L'interprete'', ''Il compagno di scuola'', and ''Enciclopedia tresigallese''. As an essayist, Marani wrote ''A Trieste con Svevo'' and ''Come ho imparato le lingue''. His book, ''La bicicletta incantata'', was made into a movie by Elisabetta Sgarbi, editor in chief of Bompiani publishing house and art producer. A more recent novel of Marani's, ''Il cane di Dio'', was published in 2012 and issued in English as ''God's Dog'' in that year as well. ''Lavorare manca'' was published in 2014. Marani also regularly writes for the cultural page of the Italian daily ''

Il Sole 24 Ore (; English: "The Sun 24 Hours") is the Italian financial newspaper of record, owned by Confindustria, the Italian employers' federation. is the leading financial daily in Italy. History and profile was first published on 9 November 1965 as ...

'' and is a blogger on eunews.it.

References

External links

Marani's European Commission Expolangues 2009 lecture

(a short story by Diego Marani)

Biography

References

External links

Further reading