Marco Malvaldi was born in Pisa in 1974. A former teacher at the Department of Bioorganic Chemistry at the University of Pisa, he established himself in the world of Italian fiction thanks to the series BarLume di Pineta, dedicated to the investigations of the local barman Massimo and the group of elderly gentlemen go to his bar. After La briscola in cinque (2007), Il gioco delle tre carte (2008) and Il re dei giochi (2010), he published Odore di chiuso (2011), a novel set in the late 19th century with the writer and gastronome Pellegrino Artusi serving as protagonist. Among his works there are also Il telefono senza fili and La battaglia navale, another book of the BarLume series. In 2015 he wrote Le regole del gioco, an amusing work that moves between natural sciences and sports, the children's story Leonardo e la marea and Buchi nella sabbia, a historical detective novel set among the Italian anarchists of the early 20th century. In the book L'infinito tra parentesi (2016) Malvaldi used his own past as a researcher to talk about the mutual influences between science and literary fiction. Between 2017 and 2018 he published the novel Negli occhi di chi guarda and the essay Le due teste del tiranno, a journey in mathematics from Pythagorean theorem to Google algorithms, followed by L'architetto dell'invisibile, Per ridere aggiungere acqua, La misura dell'uomo and A bocce ferme. In 2019 he wrote with Glay Ghammouri Vento in scatola; in 2020 Il borghese Pellegrino and the essay La direzione del pensiero, followed in 2021 by Bolle di sapone.

(photo: © Festivaletteratura)