Guido Mina di Sospiro

Early life and education

Guido Mina di Sospiro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an ancient Italian family,. He was raised in Milan, Italy. He has been living in the United States since the 1980s, currently near Washington, D.C..

He was educated at the University of Pavia, and later at the USC School of Cinema-Television, now known as USC School of Cinematic Arts, at The University of Southern California.

The Story of Yew

Mina di Sospiro's novel The Story of Yew, the memoirs of a two-thousand-year-old female yew tree, inspired by the yew that grows in the cloister of Muckross Abbey, near Killarney, in Ireland. Published in the UK to much acclaim, botanist and dendrologist Alan Mitchell opined that "As a blend of science and imaginative fiction, this is a remarkable book, far removed from 'science-fiction' as normally understood. It deals with the real world in an inventive way without putting a foot wrong.

The book has been translated into many languages, as has From the River, the memoirs of a mighty river. The latter, too, has met with critical acclaim.

The Forbidden Book

Mina di Sospiro has co-authored The Forbidden Book with Joscelyn Godwin, the noted scholar of western esoteric tradition. The novel deals with the incendiary reality of radical Islamic terrorism, with an attack first on Italian and then on Spanish soil, while trying to analyze, and then put to use by harnessing its alleged powers, a real book of 1603, written by Cesare Della Riviera, entitled Il Mondo magico de gli heroi (The Magical World of the Heroes). It is a very mysterious treatise of alchemy that supposedly teaches how to attain the Tree of Life and make a man into a god. In the novel, the Riviera family possesses a secret, annotated edition that gives specific instructions on magical techniques and sexual alchemy.

The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong

On his own, the author has recently publishedThe Metaphysics of Ping-Pong, of which Publishers Weekly states that it "can constitute a perfect introduction to the vast history of humankind's quest for philosophical clarity." He contributes to the web-magazine Reality Sandwich and to the alternative views website Disinformation Company.

Leeward and Windward

A romance of the high seas that toys with the tropes of conventional fiction as a pretext for a daring alchemical exploration of the coniunctio oppositorum. Philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has likened it to Voltaire's Candide. In its Italian edition as Sottovento e sopravvento the novel has garnered rave reviews.

Translations

His books have been translated into Bulgarian, Danish, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.