Carmine Abate

He has written numerous short stories, novels and essays, mainly focusing on issues of migration and the encounters between disparate cultures.

[1] Abate spent his childhood in Carfizzi, a small village of the Arbëreshë community in the southern region of Calabria.

This was followed by a socio-anthropological study conducted jointly with Meike Behrmann; their account of a community of Calabrian emigrants was published as I Germanesi.

Having spent more than a decade in Germany, Abate returned to Italy and settled in Besenello in Trentino, where he continues to work as a writer and teacher.

Abate's debut novel Il ballo tondo (1991) is an exclusive Bildungsroman set in Hora, a small Albanian colony built in the 15th century in the South of Italy that becomes a place of myth, legend, magic, love, life, and death, like the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez.