Francesco Benozzo

Francesco Benozzo (born 22 February 1969) is an Italian poet, musician and philologist

Author of long epic poems about natural landscapes, Benozzo usually composes them orally and then perform them with his harp (the last published is Felci in rivolta / Ferns in revolt [2015]) . In 2015 and 2016 he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry in defence of natural places and for his use of techniques belonging to the ancient tradition of oral poetry. In 2016, on the official webpage of the Swedish Academy, he was consecrated by the international readers' jury as the most worthy author for the prize itself.

In his revolutionary book Speaking Australopithecus (written together with the archaeologist Marcel Otte) he argues for a much greater antiquity of human language than has usually been presumed in recent research (according to which it was born with Homo Sapiens at the end of Middle Paleolithic – 50.000 years ago – or at the most with some Neandertal, 200.000 years ago), providing linguistic and archaeological evidence for seeing the appearance of human language with Australopithecus, between 4 and 3 million years ago. He is the author of more than 500 publications, including academic works on oral poetry, shamanism, anarchism, ethnophilology, the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, and the problem of landscape in literature. He is the general editor of the international journals "Philology" (Peter Lang publisher, Bern-Oxford-New York), "Quaderni di Semantica" (Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, Italy) and "Quaderni di Filologia Romanza" (Pàtron editore, Bologna, Italy).

As a songwriter and harpist, he released 9 CDs, produced in Italy, Denmark and UK (the last published is L'inverno necessario / The necessary winter [2016]), reaching an international wide appeal (two special mentions at the Edinburgh Folk Awards, one prize as "Best album of the month" assigned by the magazine "RootsWorld", and for two times the National Italian Musical Prize "Giovanna Daffini"). He represented Italian poetry and music in different international happenings, including the Rich Text Literature Festival in Cardiff (Wales), the Tradicionarius Festival in Barcelona (Spain), the Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews (Scotland), the Festival Literario de Madeira (Portugal), and the Printemps des poètes (France) He performed in Rome together with the Nobel Prize Wislawa Szymborska.

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