Jolanda Insana

Jolanda Insana was born in 1937 in Messina, Italy. Insana was the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara (approximately translated “Bitter Harvest”) published in 1977. In addition to writing poetry and teaching classics to high school students, Insana was also a prolific translator of Greek and Latin, including works by Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Insana won the Viareggio Prize for poetry for La stortura (approximately translated “The Distortion”) in 2002 and the Premio Pascoli Prize in 2009.

Slashing Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2024), the first collection of her work to be published in English, was translated by Catherine Theis.

Insana died in Rome in 2016.