About the Author

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 and spent his childhood in the Friuli region of northeast Italy. In 1950 he moved to Rome, where he saw first hand the horrendous living conditions of its suburbs' immigrant inhabitants. Already a major poet, novelist and polemicist, he started working in the film industry in 1957, and during the 1960s and early 70s established a reputation as a daring and skilled director. He was murdered in 1975, although controversy continues to surround the circumstances of his death.

Reviews

`Pasolini needed to live dangerously in every sense, this passionate, contradictory man. He didn't slum it in the slums - he lived there to learn the vital language of the poor, in order to remind Italian literature of its existence.' Paul Bailey