Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli enjoys a long and distinguished career. His major works are nine vibrant novels, six of which, when taken together, create a mosaic reaching from mid-nineteenth century Sicily to contemporary Boston, Massachusetts. His recent book, Renato!, a single volume containing three related novels, is a “a blazing magnum opus” said Publisher’s Weekly, and the author himself is, in the words of one critic, “a national treasure.”

The author, now in his nineties, was born in Massachusetts in 1931. He went to public schools, worked summers at a variety of jobs, mostly manual labor, went to college and completed his first novel while teaching and studying for his graduate exams. He married Margaret Black the same year his first book was published; they have three grown-up children and nine grandchildren. Margaret Black Mirabelli, an editor and book reviewer, died unexpectedly in 2010. Eugene Mirabelli’s career has been immersed in literature, teaching it at the university level and writing it in an astonishing series of novels and short stories.

He has received numerous awards, including a Rockefeller grant, has written short stories, among them a Nebula nominee, many journalistic pieces, reviews and essays, and has works translated into Czech, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Sicilian. His novels have won First, Second, and Third (Gold, Silver and Bronze) prizes from the Independent Press Awards. Occasionally he writes brief pieces on the arts, sciences, politics, economics at CriticalPages.com. More about this writer and his books is at genemirabelli.com