• Originally from Porto
Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri
born in 1925,son by
Carmelina Fragapane and
Giuseppe Camilleri. He
began studies at the Faculty
of Literature in 1944, without
concluding them, meanwhile
publishing poems and
short stories. Around this
time he joined the Italian
Communist Party.
From 1948 to 1950 Camilleri studied stage and film direction at the Silvio
D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts, and began to take on work as a
director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and
Beckett.
His most famous works, the
Montalbano series show many
pirandellian elements.With RAI,
Camilleri worked on several TV
productions, such as Inspector
Maigret. In 1978 Camilleri wrote
his first novel Il Corso Delle
Cose ("The Way Things Go").
This was followed by Un Filo di
Fumo ("A Thread of Smoke") in
1980. A new book, La Stagione
della Caccia ("The Hunting
Season") turned out to be a
best-seller.
In 1994 Camilleri published the first in a
long series of novels: La forma dell'Acqua
(The Shape of Water) featured the character
of Inspector Montalbano, a fractious
Sicilian detective in the police force of
Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town. The
series is written in Italian but with a
substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases
and grammar. The name Montalbano is an
homage to the Spanish writer Manuel
Vázquez Montalbán. Camilleri now lives in
Rome where he works as a TV and theatre
director. About 10 million copies of his
novels have been sold to date, and are
becoming increasingly popular in the UK
and North America. He received an
honorary degree from University of Pisa in
2005.