Marta Cai was born in 1980 in Canelli. In 2006, she graduated from Turin University with a degree in History of Modern Philosophy, with a thesis entitled "The Concept of Architectonics and the Architectonics of the System in Leibniz," on the relationship between metaphysics and science. She then pursued a doctorate—which she did not complete—on the same author, but this time focusing on the concept of organism and the definition of nascent biology. She has a career as a translator of nonfiction from English and French. She has two children. She currently lives in Curitiba, Brazil, where she teaches at the Centro di Cultura Italiana. In 2019, her collection of short stories, Enti di ragione, was published to great acclaim by SuiGeneris Editore. Other short stories have appeared in magazines (Inutile, Il reportage) and anthologies (Ti racconto una canzone, Arcana 2022).
Centomilioni - Einaudi April 2023 is his first novel. In the same year, he published Brasilampi with Hopefulmonster.
One Hundred Millions: Five Campiello Prizes 2023
Can a tree, a symbol of life, initiate a meditation on loss, provide the language to speak of "those who no longer speak"? Yes, if it was the silent witness to the last days of a father's life, a contradictory and paradoxical witness, as only the deepest and most mysterious bonds can be: invasive and pioneering, widespread yet not native, honey-producing, ornamental, domesticated yet bristling with thorns, the Black Locust presents itself as a daughter, with a name that is a surname, and as a pseudo-acacia, a quasi-mimosa, an almost-female, something that never quite becomes what it seems. Through a narrative punctuated by the actions that give the chapters their titles, Marta Cai's new novel intertwines confessions and memories, failed gestures and words spoken in silence, reflections on illness and the precarious community that forms within the walls of a hospice, in an attempt to formulate an "almost" balance between fading and sprouting.
Title: Almost a Robinia, pp. 160
Author: Marta Cai
Publisher: Aboca Edizioni, 2026
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Marta Cai è nata a Canelli nel 1980. Nel 2019 esordisce con la raccolta di racconti Enti di ragione (Edizioni SuiGeneris). Del 2023 il romanzo Centomilioni (Einaudi editore), Premio Campiello - Selezione Giuria dei Letterati, il racconto Tipo psicanalisi (Tetra edizioni) e la raccolta Brasilampi (hopefulmonster editore). Ha pubblicato su riviste (inutile, Il reportage, Kaiserpanorama) e partecipato ad antologie (Ti racconto una canzone, Arcana 2022, tReMa vol. 3, edizioni Arcoiris, Splendere ai margini, Oligo editore)
Marta Cai's writing is difficult to classify: one can only be taken aback by the novelties of style, thought, approach, relationship between the word and the meaning that emerges from it. The unusual mix of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic progression and perceptive gestures of this author who recently moved from Italy to Brazil gives us these "Brasilampi", texts that recall the so-called "chronicles", short compositions without genre, epiphanies of everyday life or reflections on the greatest systems where everything is allowed except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai (a "psychogeographic" and "situated" writer) does not tell us about Brazil, does not force it into categories, descriptions, interpretations, but on the contrary and with absolute respect lets it permeate her. She thus reaches a fascinating space, both geographical and interior. She enters (and we with her) an ancestral clearing: that of non-comprehension, of the preverbal impact with the existent. She records in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her native illuminations, as if they were babblings (while instead they are dizzying lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil unexpected flashes flash, expertly set up in a hidden, but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "stories", although they are populated by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer proceeds here too, as in her previous works ("Enti di ragione", SuiGeneris, 2019 and "Centomilioni", Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable core samplings in the depths. We can call them “Brasilampi”, and so we will.
Title: Brasilampi
Author: Marta Cai
Publisher: Hopefulmonster 2023, pp 156
Rights: r.vivian literary agency