Helena Janeczek

Vilenica: Foreign Guests

Helena Janeczek was born in Munich in 1964 to a Polish-Jewish family of Holocaust survivors. She moved to Italy over forty years ago. After debuting as a poet with “Ins Freie” (Suhrkamp, 1989), she transitioned to writing prose in Italian. Her critically acclaimed books Lezioni di tenebra (1997), Cibo (2002), and Le rondini di Montecassino (2010), deal with the legacy of the 20th century, marginalized histories, memory, and imagination.

Janeczek won the 2018 Strega Prize for La ragazza con la Leica (Guanda, 2017), a novel about the photographer Gerda Taro who was “killed on duty” in the Spanish Civil War. The  bestselling novel has been translated into a dozen languages, while most of Janeczek’s work is available in French, German, and Spanish.

Her latest book, Il tempo degli imprevisti (Guanda, 2024), composed of four novellas, has earned most of Italy’s short story awards. Janeczek is a co-founder of the literary blog Nazione Indiana and organizes the literary festival SI Scrittrici Insieme, dedicated to women writers. She works as a freelance editor, and lives in Gallarate, near Milan.

Photo: Adolfo Frediani