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

Biography

Born in Tresigallo, Marani attended the Liceo Ginnasio Ariosto in Ferrara till 1978 and graduated in interpretation and translation from the ''Scuola superiore di lingue moderne per traduttori e interpreti'' in

Trieste Trieste ( , ; sl, Trst ; german: Triest ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital city, and largest city, of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of two autonomous regions which are not subdivided into prov ...

in 1983. Upon graduation he worked as freelance interpreter and translation as well as 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 translator and revisor, a position he maintained until 2006, when he joined the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

'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, Antonio Tajani,

Androulla Vassiliou Androulla Vassiliou ( el, Ανδρούλλα Βασιλείου; 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, t ...

. 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 T ...

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

European External Action Service The European External Action Service (EEAS) is the diplomatic service and combined foreign and defence ministry of the European Union (EU). The EEAS is led by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP), who is al ...

, 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 ''transl ...

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 informally known as the Council of Ministers, is the third of the seven Institutions of the European Union (EU) as ...

, 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 Brusse ...

, a mock international auxiliary language. 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 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'' 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