Corrado Alvaro was born in San Luca, Calabria in 1895, the son of a primary school teacher. When he was ten, he was sent to the Jesuit College in Frascati where he mixed with sons of the upper circles. In 1910 he was expelled for reading a banned work, Carducci’s Hymn to Satan, but he was already well-read and had studied avidly, even producing his first poetry. He had completed his studies in Calabria, and enlisted in the army in 1915, only to be badly wounded in 1916. He then embarked on his precocious career as a journalist, rising to editor of Il Resto del Carlino and then moving to Milan to work for Corriere dells Sera in 1919. In 1921 he became the foreign correspondent of Amendola’s Il Mondo in Paris, and in 1925 he signed Benedetto Croce’s Manifesto of the Antifascist Intellectuals. His literary career advanced until 1951, when he won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, with his novel Almost a Life. In 1954, he was taken ill with stomach cancer which spread to his lungs, and in 1956 he died at his home in Rome where he left behind several unfinished novels. The translated Fear in the World was published in 2020.