Guido Mina di Sospiro
Novelist Guido Mina di Sospiro belongs to an ancient aristocratic Italian family, and was raised in Milan in a multilingual home. He trained as a classical guitarist and studied orchestration with the Swiss conductor Antoine-Pierre de Bavier, who had been Furtwängler's favorite pupil. The Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa, who wrote the soundtracks of "Ben Hur", "El Cid", "Double Indemnity", etc., and won three Academy Awards, used to spend his summers across from the Mina di Sospiro's seaside home in Italy. Then in his seventies, he took young Guido under his wing and acquainted him with the University of Southern California, where he and Arnold Schönberg had taught composition. At twenty, after attending the University of Pavia and making a feature film that premiered at the National Cinémathèque in Milan, Mina di Sospiro left Italy to attend USC's School of Cinema Production. Among his mentors, Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock's favorite screenwriter and, later on, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the celebrated English editor and publisher who launched, among others, William Boyd, Peter Ackroyd and Rose Tremain. Mina di Sospiro is an award-winning, internationally published author. His novel "The Story of Yew" (the memoirs of an age-old tree), published in the UK, is permanently featured on the Encylopaedia Britannica, and has been translated into Italian (Rizzoli), Spanish and Catalan (RBA), Greek and Bulgarian (Kyveli), Korean (Samgakhyung), with more translations due to appear in France, Argentina, Japan, etc. Rizzoli in Italy have recently published another novel of his, "From the River", the memoirs of a mighty river, to great critical acclaim. It too is translated from the original English, now due out in many foreign editions. Mina di Sospiro currently lives in Miami with his wife and their three sons and travels often to Europe and elsewhere so as to promote the various editions of his books. "In my forty years as a publisher and literary agent I have known many distinguished writers working in many genres of literature. One of the most wholly original is Guido Mina di Sospiro. To say that he is traditional in his approach to the writing of fiction is partially true, in that he is a master of narrative and characterisation. To say that he is experimental is also partially true, in that he can produce remarkable flights of fancy which transport the reader from the commonplace to the extraordinary, literally out of the world as we know it." (Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson)
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