Timothy Harold Parks is a renowned British author, novelist, translator, and literature professor. He was born in Manchester in 1954 and grew up in London. Parks pursued his higher education at Cambridge and Harvard before moving to Italy in 1981, where he has lived ever since. He has raised a family of three children in Italy and has become deeply connected to the country, which is often reflected in his works.
Parks has authored more than eighteen novels, with his first novel, Tongues of Flame, winning the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and Betty Trask Award in 1986. The same year, his book Loving Roger won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Some of his other highly praised books include Destiny, Shear, Cleaver, Judge Savage, and In Extremis. Parks's stories have also been published in The New Yorker, further solidifying his reputation as a master storyteller.
In addition to his novels, Parks has written several personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, including Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. He has also published a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football, A Season with Verona. Parks's non-fiction works also include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money, and a memoir on health, illness, and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. His latest non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, was published in 2013.
Parks is also an accomplished translator and has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli, and Leopardi. His critical book, Translating Style, is considered a classic in its field. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work. Over the last five years, he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation, and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.