Nanni Cagnone

Nanni Cagnone (10 April 1939 – 3 April 2026) was an Italian poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. He debuted as a poet in 1954 and since then has written several books, mostly poetry but also plays, tales and novels, theoretical essays and aphorisms, from The Disabled Youth to The Oslo Lecture (2008). He is the brother of the artist Angelo Cagnone, and was married to Sandra Holt. He lived in Bomarzo.

Life and career In the 1960s–1970s, he was senior editor of Lerici Publishers, editor of Marcatré (an avant-garde magazine of art, literature, and music), managing editor of Design Italia, and later founded and headed the Italian publishing house Coliseum. He was also a professor of aesthetics and contributed articles to newspapers and cultural magazines, among them Chelsea Review, Incognita, Alea, Or, Il Giornale, Il Messaggero, Bonniers Litterära Magasin, FMR, Il Verri. His translations include Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Wreck of the Deutschland, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Jack Spicer's The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Gabriel Magaña Merlo's Intolerante superficie, Paul Vangelisti's Solitude, Parmenides' Perì Physeos.

Cagnone's works are characterized by a clean, almost purist meditation, where mythology and modernity, feeling and criticism are compressed into a peculiar and intense ontological recovery. Cagnone is said to have been one of the most innovative and distinctive poets of contemporary European literature. His poems are used as lyrics for contemporary music. The Norwegian composer Harald Sæther has written a song cycle with lyrics from Index Vacuus, the cantata Obstupescit Venticinque with lyrics from What's Hecuba to Him or He to Hecuba? and A, in altre parole B, for three vocal quartets, by the poem with the same title.

About his own poetry, Cagnone wrote: "Poetry is this interval between us and things, this interrupted feeling, the lost object in the home of desire. Poetry is an extraneous work, something sleep would teach awakening. It demands a passive feeling, a receptive thought and desires learnt by answering. Poetry is not the act of collecting the world like a rescuer of sense or a flatterer of language, but the aimless cult of an excessive figure and the experience of a faithfulness: that of a Saying, which doesn't want to leave his Silent lover. Poetry is acting beyond, beyond what one manages to think".

Cagnone died on 3 April 2026, at the age of 86.

Awards Naples Award, 2019 Rome Foundation Award, 2025