Gregor von Rezzori

“Gregor von Rezzori seems to have come as close as any one man could to embodying what they call Weltliteratur - a literature without frontiers - and the Vallombrosa Prize is beautifully in keeping with the spirit of his books”

Gregor von Rezzori was in born in Cernovitz, Bucovina in 1914. He spent his childhood and youth in the unstable territory of Central and Eastern Europe, studying in Bucharest and Vienna, and then moved to Germany where he married and had three children. In post-war Germany he soon became an important literary figure with the publication of Ein Hermelin in Cernopol (An Ermine in Cernopol ), which won him the prestigious Theodor Fontane, Tales From Magrebinia and Oedipus at Stalingrad.

He travelled extensively in Europe without putting roots anywhere. In the mid-Sixties he married Beatrice Monti della Corte, an Italian aristocrat and a prominent figure in the art world, who through her gallery in Milano was closely involved with artists and writers. Their house in Tuscany provided the perfect anchor for his writing for the next 35 years, which were the most productive of his literary career. Here he could finally finish his monumental book The Death of my Brother Abel, and his surprising masterpiece Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, an early part of which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1969. Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was acclaimed in the American press, where Rezzori's work was compared to that of Musil, Schnitzler, Pirandello and Italo Svevo. He went on to write The Snows of Yesteryear, a childhood memoir that soon became a classic. Their Tuscan home proved itself a writing haven not only for Rezzori but also for a stellar cast of friends, among them Bruce Chatwin and Michael Ondaatje.

Gregor von Rezzori continued to write until the end. Among his later books were Anecdotage, a book of reflections and memories of the contemporary world, and his last work, the memoir Mir auf dem Spur. He was also working at the continuation of the Abel which was published , unfinished, under the name of Cain. He died at Santa Maddalena in 1998.