Name Helen Barolini Role Author | Awards American Book Awards | |
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Spouse Antonio Barolini (m. 1950) Education Syracuse University, Columbia University, University of London Books Umbertina, Aldus and his dream book, Chiaroscuro, Crossing the Alps: A Novel, A Circular Journey | ||
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Helen Barolini (maiden name Mollica) (November 18, 1925) is an American author, born in Syracuse, New York. She has been included in Best American Essays for 1991 and 1993. Her first book, the novel Umbertina (1979), was assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2008 won the Premio Acerbi, a coveted Italian literary prize. Her anthology The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women received an American Book Award.
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Barolini attended Wells College in Aurora, Cayuga County, New York, and graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University. She received a master's degree from Columbia University. She was an exchange student at the University of London where she studied contemporary English literature, and then traveled in Europe writing "Letters from Abroad" for the Syracuse Herald-Journal. Following studies in Italy, she married the late Italian author and journalist Antonio Barolini, and lived in Italy and the United States. She became the English translator of Antonio's books "The Last Family Countess" (1960) and "A Long Madness" (1964) both published by Victor Gollancz LTD, London, excerpts of which were subsequently published in The New Yorker and Reporter.
She has been an invited writer at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and a writer in residence at the Mark Twain Quarry Center of Elmira College, and has been honored by MELUS, the American Italian Cultural Roundtable, the Order Sons of Italy in America, the Italian Welfare League, and other organizations for her literary work on the Italian-American experience.
She married Antonio Barolini, an Italian poet, they had three children Teodolinda Barolini, the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in humanities in the field of Italian Literature, Susanna Mengacci, and Nicoletta Barolini an art director at Columbia University.