Giorgio Amitrano

Giorgio Amitrano (; born 31 October 1957) is an Italian Japanologist, translator and essayist, specializing in Japanese language and literature.

Life and career Amitrano grew up in Naples, graduating from the University of Naples "L'Orientale"; his professors included , Luigi Polese Remaggi and Namkhai Norbu. He won a scholarship to Tokyo in 1984. The following year he moved to Osaka, where he stayed until 1989, also teaching at Osaka University.

He currently is full professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies at L'Orientale. He also presided the Faculty of Political Science of the same university, where he taught Language and Culture of Japan. In 2012, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nominated him head of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo for a five-year term.

He is the translator to Italian of the works of Banana Yoshimoto (alongside Gala Maria Follaco) and Haruki Murakami, as well as having translated some of the works of Yasunari Kawabata and Yasushi Inoue. His translations earned him the Alcantara Prize in 1999, the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2001, the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 2008, and the (Special Jury Prize for Literary and Scientific Translation) in 2012. In 2020, he was awarded membership of the Order of the Rising Sun.

Amitrano is deputy editor of the journal ; since 2004, he has written in the monthly magazine on literary and figurative arts , and he also collaborates to a number of Italian newspapers and cultural publications: , , , Alias, and .

As a main author, the Italian School of East Asian Studies published his volume The New Japanese Novel: Popular Culture and Literary Tradition in the Work of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana (1996) and Feltrinelli (1999, expanded in 2007). In 2007, he wrote the introduction to by artist . In 2018, he published with DeA Planeta Libri , where he analyzes present-day Japan between tradition and modernity.