Tim Parks

Timothy Harold Parks (born 19 December 1954) is a British novelist who has lived in Italy since 1981. He is also an author of nonfiction, a translator from Italian to English, and a professor of literature.

Early life and academic career Parks was born in Manchester, the son of Harold Parks, an Anglican vicar and missionary, and his wife Joan. He grew up in Finchley, and was educated at Westminster City School and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English. During his time in the United States, he wrote introductions for the dramatisations of novels on behalf of the Boston public radio station WGBH. Upon returning to Europe, Parks was employed initially as a marketing executive for a translation company before working as a freelance translator and teacher in Verona. From 1985 to 1992 he was a lecturer at the University of Verona. He was made a Visiting Lecturer at the Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne in Milan (now known as IULM University) in 1992, and from 2005 to 2019 was an Associate Professor there. and Somerset Maugham Award in 1986. In the same year, Parks was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Loving Roger. Other highly praised titles were Shear, Destiny, Judge Savage, Cleaver, and In Extremis. He has also published short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere.

Since the 1990s Parks has written frequently for the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books and has published nonfiction books, including A Season with Verona, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and Teach Us to Sit Still, shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.

Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, and Fleur Jaeggy. His nonfiction book Translating Style was described as "canonical in the field of translation studies". He twice won the John Florio Prize for translations from the Italian. In 2011 he co-curated the exhibition Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and a book of the same title, edited by Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, was published in 2012 by Giunti. . The exhibition was loosely based on Parks' book Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence.

Personal life Parks married Rita Baldassarre in 1979 and moved to Italy shortly thereafter. The couple have three children. They divorced in 2017. In 2020 he married Eleonora Gallitelli.