Life
Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978.
He is an essayist and columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and for other European journals and newspapers. His numerous studies have helped to promote an awareness in Italy of Central European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth, a concept which he coined in 1963.
Magris is a member of several European academies and served as a senator in the Italian Senate from 1994 to 1996.
His first book on the Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature rediscovered central European literature. His journalistic writings have been collected in Dietro le parole ("Behind Words", 1978) and Itaca e oltre ("Ithaca and Beyond", 1982). He has written essays on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. His novels and theatre productions, many translated into several languages, include Illazioni su una sciabola (1984), Danubio (1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), and Microcosmi (1997). His travel writing is collected in Journeying (Yale University Press, 2018).
His breakthrough was Danubio (published as Danube in English) (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book (said by the author to be a "drowned novel"), Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea, tracing the influences of Christendom and Islam on the formation of central Europe. Microcosmi (Microcosms in English) focuses on the Italian-Istrian borderlands.
