The Santa Maddalena Newsletter April 20172017-04-112019-06-02https://new.santamaddalena.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/logo.pngSanta Maddalena Foundationhttps://new.santamaddalena.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/img_1999.jpg200px200px
Spring has come early to Tuscany, and Fellow Karin Altenberg, with Swedish fortitude, has already inaugurated the pool! Less brave, or perhaps less foolish, are her fellow Fellows, Zachary Mason and Helen Simpson, who nonetheless have found less bracing pleasures in the local treasure Formica and in reading beneath the newly blooming wisteria (graciously pruned by earlier fellow Robin Robertson). A fox has been spotted, and Fellows have reported hearing a wolf! (though it could be Carlotta)
Earlier in the season, for the first time, Santa Maddalena was entirely poets, with Robin, Maureen McLane and Sean Borodale. These writers began missing their daily eggs, and we discovered an adorable but wicked local faina (beech marten) had been visiting the chicken coop. We are remaking it into a kind of Fort Knox.
We are always proud of former Fellows making the news, including Mary Gaitskill, Georgi Gospodinov, John Vaillant, and John Banville on the IMPAC Dublin longlist, Zadie Smith as finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and special congratulations to Hisham Matar, who won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for a book-length work in any genre.
