Andrew Marcolongo
Andrea Marcolongo is an Italian journalist, essayist and writer. She, this Mediterranean author, revolutionized the world of language in 2016, when she published a series of essays entitled The great language. 9 ragioni per amare il greco —later translated as The language of the gods: nine reasons to love Greek—. Since then, Marcolongo has been known for The world and other publications such as "the new Greek heroine".
Talking about Andrea Marcolongo is, at the same time, talking about languages, especially Latin and ancient Greek.. What the writer's debut feature includes, precisely, is her need to preserve a language that —according to her— has been in charge of teaching logic, philosophy and politics to the human being. That is why she undertook the daunting task of writing texts on how to learn Plato's language.
Biography of Andrea Marcolongo
Birth, studies and first jobs
Andrea Marcolongo was born on January 17, 1987, in Crema, a region of Lombardy in northern Italy. Since she was very young, she felt inspired by Greece, its traditions and its language. From then on, he studied the main authors of that region, meeting for the first time with Homer, Herodotus, Anaxagoras, Thucydides and Plato. Later, that same passion for this Balkan land would lead her to graduate in Classical Literature from the Università degli Studi di Milano.
After graduating he moved to Turin, where he specialized in storytelling at the Scuola Holden. Since then, in addition to collaborating in several local newspapers, worked as a ghostwriter for politician Mateo Renzi and the Democratic Party. She developed this last activity between 2013 and 2014, before focusing her attention on researching and refining the essays that would put her in the literary arena.
The language of the gods: nine reasons to love Greek
The first edition of The language of the gods: nine reasons to love Greek, published in 2016, sold 150.000 copies in Italy alone. That same year she won the Lions Club Youth Award at the Cesare Angelini award at the University of Pavia. Subsequently, the work was translated into a considerable number of languages, including Belgian, French, German, English and Spanish. The latter was worked on by the Penguin Random House publishing label.
Swimming between diverse opinions
Throughout its existence, Andrea Marcolongo's essays have received very positive reviews. Nevertheless, good reception does not ignore negative comments, especially by the classicists, who brand them as imprecise.
Even so, the author has been praised by publications such as Le Figaro, The New Yorker. Mary Norris —responsible for the review that was made of Marcolongo's selection in the T.N.Y.— called it “an instant classic.”
Along with her other jobs, both as a journalist and as a ghostwriter, Andrea Marcolongo continued with the publication of her works. This is the case of The Eroica Measure. Il mito degli Argonauti e il coraggio che spinge gli uomini ad amare —whose translation into Spanish is heroic measure. The myth of the Argonauts and the courage that drives men to love. This work was published in 2018, and was translated into multiple languages.
During his career, The writer has participated in several groups in charge of disseminating education, culture and letters. Marcolongo is vice president of the Writers of the French Navy. This is an association affiliated with the Ministry of Defense that aims to preserve the culture of the sea. Thanks to this role, the author has an honorary title as frigate captain. Likewise, she works reviewing foreign texts and literature for the weekly supplement Tuttolibri of La Stampa.
Works by Andrea Marcolongo
- Great language. 9 ragioni per amare il greco — The Language of the Gods: Nine Reasons to Love Greek (2016);
- The Eroica Measure. Il mito degli Argonauti e il coraggio che spinge gli uomini ad amare — heroic measure. The myth of the Argonauts and the courage that drives men to love (2018);
- alla fonte delle parole — Etymologies to survive chaos (2019);
- The lesion of Enea — The art of resisting: What the Aeneid teaches us about how to overcome a crisis (2020);
- The journey of the parole — the journey of words (2021);
- Of Gymnastic Art. Give Maratona to Atene with him ai piedi — An autobiography of running (2022)
Most outstanding works of Andrea Marcolongo
The language of the gods (2016)
This collection of tests is a love letter to the language of the ancient Greeks, through which civilized men learned to organize their ideas thanks to the word. Even today we use many terminologies that originated in Greece. Together with Latin, it is one of the dialects that have allowed us to communicate.
En este sentido, Andrea Marcolongo molds the Greek alphabet to modernity and gives the reader the opportunity to continue his study, so that the words that made us evolve so much are not lost. However, the brilliant mind of the writer builds anthological essays that have the purpose of playing a little with the reader to teach him how to think in ancient Greek.
Etymologies to survive chaos (2019)
Andrew Marcolongo is characterized by his passion for cataloguing, studying and treasuring words that the generations that preceded us used, because this same language is used today, in a multitude of countries. In Etymologies to survive chaos, the author tells ninety-nine stories, each one about a different word.
According to Marcolongo, she does not consider these to be the most important or the oldest, but rather those that have given her pleasure. The writer has chosen these words consciously, because thanks to them, he is able to offer the reader a journey through history, mythology, politics, the fantasy of forgotten peoples and the explanation of how these same concepts reached modernity, always a little hidden under the adoption from their host countries.