Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, Sex is Forbidden and, most recently, In Extremis, all of them published in half a dozen countries.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education, books that won acclaim and popularity for their anthropological wryness. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, at once a comic microcosm of provincial fandom and a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the business and passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a narrative reflection on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
During his years in Italy, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, is considered a classic in its field and he currently runs a post-graduate degree in translation at IULM university in Milan.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back and The Fighter. Over the last three years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From.