BOOKS
A Selection
Below is a selection of titles by Arianna Dagnino.
Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2019
Set in the turmoil of newly-post apartheid South Africa, Arianna Dagnino’s novel The Afrikaner (Guernica Editions) is the story of Zoe Du Plessis (33), a woman scientist of Afrikaner descent. A personal tragedy leads Zoe to face her family’s dark secret while she is struggling with the self-reproach for her country’s shameful past. A scientific expedition into the hot plains of the Kalahari Desert sets Zoe on a path of atonement and self-discovery that will allow her to reclaim her identity and meet some memorable characters along the way – among them, a troubled writer, a Bushman shaman and a Border War veteran.
The book is inspired by the five years (1996-2000) the author spent in South Africa working as an international reporter for the Italian press and is currently adapted to screen by the author in collaboration with Dr. Ernst Mathijs, Head of the Centre for Cinema and Film Studies at the University of British Columbia.
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"Arianna Dagnino’s transcultural novel of a young woman’s struggle to recover from the brutal killing of her lover, cope with her family’s tragic past and find her way in post-Apartheid South Africa is both moving and memorable. Drawing on her years as a journalist in South Africa, Dagnino de-layers the country’s conflicts, introduces some remarkable characters and takes the reader on a spellbinding journey” — Ian Thomas Shaw, author of Quill of the Dove
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Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, 2015
The book consists of a creative nonfiction piece, which the author self-translated from Italian into English, and of a critical exegesis on transnational flows, transcultural writing, identity and cultural translation.
“In this thought-provoking study, Arianna Dagnino is concerned to identify a cohort of writers who, in the ease with which they move between domiciles, languages and cultures, find themselves ahead of the pack in expressing a newly emergent transcultural sensibility. In a series of interviews, intercut with her own diary entries and treated to a light process of fictionalization – which is brought off with a novelist’s skilled hand – five writers present their reflections on their genesis, their present situation, and their future aims in a more and more globalized world, reflections which are never less than interesting and are often far-sighted. Their comments are in turn interrogated by Dagnino and set in a wider framework of transcultural theory. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility is a significant contribution to a growing body of work on the metamorphosis of literary culture in times of dissolving cultural boundaries.” – Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee, The University of Adelaide
We are all born in the confined sea of our mother’s womb. but once we realize we belong to the infinite ocean of life, we act like selkies drawn to those wider horizons. The poems of this collection can be read in many ways, depending on your “seaborn eyes.” They are deeply private messages from the inside person we wish someone else could know; fleeting reports of universal longings that people can use as they like, like good song lyrics – both urgent and wistful. To a more basic level, they are chronically hopeful odes written by someone who is missing who she used to be.
BUY THE BOOK on Ekstasis's websbite
Ipoc, 2009
A slim and thought-provoking pamphlet on the birth of the World Wide Web seen through the eyes of its pioneers and apostles. It explores the Internet's founding (and, eventually, disavowed) ideals of equality, transparency, fairness, and freedom from market constraints.
Ensemble Edizioni, Roma, 2021
