Elisa Donzelli

Elisa Donzelli (Turin, 1979) is an associate professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore, where she teaches contemporary Italian literature to undergraduate and graduate students. She is also a member of the teaching staff of the PhD program in Italian Studies and Modern Philology.

She studied in the former Department of Italian Studies at La Sapienza University in Rome under the guidance of Giulio Ferroni, Amedeo Quondam, and Biancamaria Frabotta. After graduating from La Sapienza, she obtained her PhD in Italian Studies in 2007 and was a research fellow for the two-year period 2010-2012. In 2013, she completed a post-doctorate at the Cini Foundation in Venice and in 2017 she received national scientific qualification as Associate Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature. Between 2008 and 2010, she taught at the Luiss University International High School and since 2017 she has been an adjunct professor at Roma Tre University.

A scholar of 20th-century literature, her attention has always been focused primarily on poetry and poetic translation, followed by fiction from the last century and the new millennium, with a focus on research conducted both in Italy and abroad within contemporary literary collections and archives. The result of these investigations is her first monograph, Come lenta cometa. Traduzione e amicizia poetica nel carteggio tra Sereni e Char (Aragno 2009), the editing of unpublished translations by Sereni from Char presented by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Due rive ci vogliono, Donzelli 2010), and the conception of the exhibition Giorgio Caproni. Roma la città del ‘disamore’  (with the publication of the book of the same name, De Luca 2012), the monograph Giorgio Caproni e gli altri. Temi, percorsi e incontri nella poesia europea del Novecento (Marsilio 2016), which won the 2017 Marino Moretti Prize for ‘History and Literary Criticism’ and the 2018 Renzo Sertoli Salis Prize for ‘Literary Non-fiction’. For the Einaudi poetry collection, she edited the volume Poesie di René Char translated by Giorgio Caproni (Einaudi 2018), winner of the 2018 City of Fiumicino Poetry Prize for ‘Poetic Translation’. For the publisher il mulino, in the Tracce series, he published the correspondence between Attilio Bertolucci and art critic Roberto Tassi, Tra due città. Lettere 1951-1995 (il mulino 2019) in collaboration with the “Fondo Tassi” di Parma directed by Mario Lavagetto. For the publisher Marsilio, the proceedings of the conference held in Trieste for the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's birth: Pasolini: figures, places, dialogues (Marsilio 2024).

In 2025, he published his third monograph, Inventing Memory. Giovinezza e antifascismo: Lalla Romano, Mario Soldati, Carlo Levi, promoted and supported by the Department of Excellence of the Scuola Normale, the result of research begun in 2018.

Three years ago, he began a project on the forms and motifs of poetry in the 1970s, Italian women's poetry in the 20th century, and the poetry of those born in the 1970s and 1980s.

She has numerous other publications to her credit in scientific and class A journals dedicated, among others, to Diego Valeri, Giovanni Giudici, Andrea Zanzotto, Franco Fortini, Mario Luzi, Elsa Morante, Rocco Scotellaro, Fabio Pusterla, Pierre Jean Jouve, Philippe Jaccottet, Lalla Romano, and Cristina Campo. She is the official French translator of the works of psychoanalyst and semiologist Julia Kristeva and has contributed to newspapers including Alias, il manifesto, and il venerdì di Repubblica. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Class A journals Ticontré. Teoria Testo Traduzione and Italian Poteri Review.

For years she has edited the contemporary poetry series for Donzelli Editore.

She is the author of the poetry collection album (edizioni nottetempo 2021), which won the first Città di Legnano - Giuseppe Tirinnanzi 2021 poetry prize, the “Opera prima Alma Mater Elena Violani Landi” award from the University of Bologna 2021, the Metauro Award 2021, and an honorable mention in the Camaiore Literary Award 2022 and the plaquette uomini blu with notes by Maurizio Cucchi and Ana Blandiana, a drawing by Giulia Napoleone (Stampa2009, 2023).

Her poems have been translated into Greek, Romanian, Russian, Polish, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese in anthologies and foreign magazines. Her album was translated by the poet Prisca Agustoni in Brazil in a separate edition.

She has participated in national and international poetry festivals, including the Poesia Festival in Modena, Pordenonelegge, Cabudanne de sos poetas, and Parole spalancate in Genoa. In 2025, she represented Italy as the voice of women's poetry at the International Poetry Festival in Bucharest, Romania.

She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Strega Poetry Prize of the G. E. M. Bellonci Foundation in Rome; she is President and founder of the “Premio Nazionale Poesia del Mezzogiorno” (National Poetry Prize of Southern Italy) and a member of the jury of the “Premio internazionale Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Aurisina” (Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Aurisina International Prize) and the “Premio Ludovico Corrao” (Ludovico Corrao Prize) of the Orestiadi Foundation of Gibellina for young poetry.