Nanni Cagnone[1] (born in 1939 in Carcare, Liguria) is an Italian poet, novelist, essayist and playwright.

He debuted as a poet in 1954 and since then has written several books, mostly poetry but also plays and novels, theoretical essays and aphorisms, from The Disabled Youth (1967) to The Oslo Lecture[2] (2008).

His translations include Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Wreck of the Deutschland, Aeschylus' Agamemnon.,[3] Jack Spicer's The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Gabriel Magaña Merlo's Intolerante superficie, Paul Vangelisti's Solitude, Parmenides' Perì Physeos.

Cagnone's works are characterized by a clean, almost purist meditation, where mythology and modernity, feeling and criticism are compressed into a peculiar and intense ontological recovery.

Poetry is not the act of collecting the world like a rescuer of sense or a flatterer of language, but the aimless cult of an excessive figure and the experience of a faithfulness: that of a Saying, which doesn’t want to leave his Silent lover.