Born in Naples in 1950, Erri de Luca is the author of fiction, plays, translations and poetry.

At the age of 18 he left Naples and began his involvment with the non-parliamentary political left wing until the early 1980s. Between 1983 and 1984 he volunteered on a programme providing water supplies to villages in Tanzania. During the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, he drove a lorry for a humanitarian convoy. Two friendships date from this time, with the poet Izet Sarajlic, whom he met in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, and with the poet Ante Zemijar, a party leader in the anti-Nazi war.

His first novel, Non ora, non qui (Not Now, Not Here) was published in Italy in 1989. His books have been translated into over 30 languages. Having taught himself Swahili, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, he has translated parts of the Old Testament.

For film, he has written the shorts Di là dal vetro (Beyond the Window), Il Turno di Notte lo Fanno le Stelle (The Night Shift is for the Stars) (premiered at the Tribeca Festival in New York, 2013), the musical biography La Musica Provata (Practiced Music) and the documentary Alberi che camminano (Dawns they Walked). He translated Cocteau’s La voiz humaine (The Human Voice) into Neapolitan dialect for the performance by Sophia Loren. He has acted on stage in Attraverso (Backwards)(Mario Brunello, Gabriele Mirabassi, Marco Paolini, Gianmaria Testa); "Quijote y los Invencibles" (“Don Quixote and the Invincibles”)(Gabriele Mirabassi and Gianmaria Testa); “En nombre de la madre" (“In the Name of the Mother”)(Sara Cianfriglia and Simone Gandolfo); "In viaggio con Aurora” “Voyage with Aurora”)(Aurora De Luca); "Chisciottimisti" (Gabriele Mirabassi and Gianmaria Testa).

He loves mounaineering and his favourites are the Dolomites.

In September 2013 he was accused of “incitement to commit criminal acts” for his support for the fight against the TGV line in the Valle de Susa. The trial began on 28th January 2015 and has just finished, at the end of October, with his complete exoneration. He published “La palabra contraria” in his own defence.

Erri de Luca lives in the countryside near Rome, where he keeps on planting trees.