Berlin Fellowship 2024 — Literature
Vita
Claudia Durastanti is a fiction writer and literary translator. She has published five novels and has translated the works of Elizabeth Hardwick, Donna Haraway and Ocean Vuong. She’s a regular contributor to “La Stampa and Internazionale”. “Strangers I Know｜Die Fremde” (Premio Strega Off in 2019, Pen Translates Award) has been translated into 21 languages. “Missitalia” (La Nave di Teseo, Premio Mondello, 2024) will be published by Zsolnay Verlag in Austria and Germany. Durastanti currently lives in Rome and curates "La Tartaruga Edizioni", a series of feminist publications that started in the 1970s.
Residency
My latest work of fiction, “Missitalia”, is a tale of extractivism spanning the interplay between technology and magic in Southern Italy for over two hundred years. The novel explores the potential of the faux historical novel. It discusses the idea that overfilled archives can create as much of a fictional black hole as empty archives do. The original draft included a literary anthology as a framing device to reveal power dynamics within history, fiction and canonisation, especially if a female subject is the focus of the narration. During my residency, I wish to retrieve these false archives and anthologies embedded in the novel only through text, to expand their visual potential and to further my research on historical-geographical materialism in Southern literature.