Dino Buzzati

Dino Buzzati was an Italian writer, journalist, and artist.

He was born in the San Pellegrino district of the municipality of Belluno in 1906. He studied in Milan, earned a law degree, and at the age of 22 joined Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, Milan’s Corriere della Sera. In the early 1930s, Buzzati’s first novels appeared, written in a “Kafkaesque” style. During the Second World War he served in Africa as a journalist attached to the Royal Italian Navy. In September 1943 he returned to Milan, where he continued working as an editor for the newspaper. The novel Love was published in 1963. In 1964 he married Almerina Antoniazzi. In 1972 Dino Buzzati died in Milan of pancreatic cancer.

He gained the greatest recognition as a novelist and playwright. Buzzati’s prose tends toward fantasy and often has the character of a parable; in this respect he is often compared with Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka. His works almost always contain something supernatural and irrational. His best-known book, the novel The Tartar Steppe (1940), tells of a fort forgotten by everyone on the border with the desert from which an invasion is expected. Everyone in the fort lives in anticipation of the hordes they will be able to fight and sees themselves as the country’s saviors. Those who find themselves in the fortress cannot leave it.

As an artist, he illustrated his own books, worked in theater, wrote several stage plays and radio dramas, as well as librettos, poems, and numerous short stories. Even during Buzzati’s lifetime, a solo exhibition of his work was held in Milan.