ANNUAL LECTURE The British Library Conference Centre 29 June 2015, 18:00

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome Ian Thomson, University of East Anglia

Wine and light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

Attendance is free but registration is required. If you intend to come to the lecture please email Chris Michaelides: [email protected], ISLG Chair, and type ISLG Lecture in the subject line.

Supported by Image: P.P. Pasolini and Orson Welles on the set of "La ricotta", Rome 1963 Photograph Mario Dondero, © 1963. With the kind assistance of the Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa delle Delizie, Pordenone

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome

Ian Thomson, University of East Anglia

On the morning of November 2, 1975, in a shanty town outside Rome, Pier Paolo Pasolini was found murdered. A verdict is still open on the case: he was 53. Pasolini’s numerous works of poetry, fiction, journalism and film championed the disinherited and damned of post-war Rome, mingling an intellectual Leftism with a sentimental Franciscan Catholicism. (Blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, rationalism and property.) In Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome, Ian Thomson explores Pasolini’s poetic transfiguration of the Italian capital, in all its terrible grandeur.

Ian Thomson, “an author of great range and sensibility” (Guardian), is an award-winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic. His book Primo Levi: A Life, regarded as the definitive biography of the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor, won the Royal Society of Literature’s W.H.Heinemann prize. In 2010 he was awarded the Ondaatje Prize as well as the Dolman Travel Book Award for his reportage The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (Faber, 2009). He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia.