In occasione dell’uscita in lingua inglese de “La bambola di cristallo” (“The girl with the crystal eyes”) lo scrittore inglese Michael Gregorio, autore, tra gli altri, del best seller “Critica della ragion criminale” (Einaudi), mi ha intervistato per Rap sheet, uno dei più interessanti e più prestigiosi blog americani di Crime fiction. Trovate il testo itero della chiacchierata a questo indirizzo. Un ringraziamento particolare alla traduttrice Milena Rosa per l’aiuto 🙂
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Dark Lady’s Bright Prospects
Italian author Barbara Baraldi was first mentioned in The Rap Sheet two months ago, in our interview with British editor and former bookstore proprietor Maxim Jakubowski. We reported then that Jakubowski had signed the 35-year-old Baraldi as a contributor to his new publishing imprint, MaxCrime. 
Her thriller, The Girl with the Crystal Eyes (originally published in Italy in 2008), is being released this month in the UK as Max Crime’s first English-translated work. Jakubowski describes the book as containing “echoes of Hitchcock and [Italian film producer] Dario Argento and strong female characters on both sides of the good and evil divide.” Which is not faint praise.
Baraldi was born in the northern Italian countryside midway between Modena and Bologna. She fell in love with books and reading while still at school, and eventually she decided to study foreign literature. “My diet was a book a night,” she says. During the same period, she started writing “without telling anyone.” She had also “fallen in love with photography,” and hoped to become a professional shooter. To pay for her studies, she worked as a fashion model, which allowed her the luxury of a “very expensive” pro-quality camera. “That was when I started visually exploring the dark, forgotten corners of Bologna,” she explains.
During our recent conversation with Baraldi, we talked about her pseudonymous debut as a writer, her early taste in authors, and her fascination with the “dark side” of life and how that affects her fiction.
Michael Gregorio: I’m wondering how a studious young woman from the Italian countryside turned into a writer of noir. And in Bologna, too, a city famous for fine food and a love of the best things in life, rather than violent crime.
Barbara Baraldi: Well, I’ve always liked to tell stories… Continua qui