Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and studied philosophy at the University of Milan, where he still lives. Alongside his fiction he works as an art critic and as a translator into Italian. His translations include Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi, and he has written for the art magazine frieze.
His fiction looks at how a generation lives, works and travels, and at the gap between the life people display and the life they have. He has published novels, a theatre piece and a travel book made with the photographer Armin Linke. Titles in Italian include La cospirazione delle colombe (The Conspiracy of Doves, 2011) and Gymnastics and Revolution. His prose is cool and observational, closer to a sociologist's notebook than to confession.
Le perfezioni (2022) won the Premio Mondello and was among the twelve books chosen for the Strega Prize. Its English edition, Perfection, appeared in 2025 and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It was also longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judges called it a taut, spare sociological novel. According to Wikipedia, his novels have been translated in more than twenty countries.
Start with Perfection, in Sophie Hughes's translation. It follows Anna and Tom, a couple who move to Berlin and build a good-looking creative life there, and then watch it go stale as friends leave and the city changes. At about 120 pages it takes an evening or two. Reviewers often compare it to Georges Perec's Les Choses, so readers who like that book will have a good idea of what to expect.
