Francesco Benozzo


Francesco Benozzo is an Italian poet, musician and philologist. He works as a Research Fellow in Philology at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Biographical notes

Author of long epic poems about natural landscapes, Benozzo usually composes them orally and then performs them with his harp and La capanna del naufrago / The Castaway's Shack . Since 2015 he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry in defence of natural places and for his use of techniques belonging to the ancient tradition of oral poetry. In 2016, on the official webpage of the Swedish Academy, he was consecrated by the international readers' jury as the most worthy author for the prize itself.
In his revolutionary book Speaking Australopithecus he argues for a much greater antiquity of human language than has usually been presumed in recent research, providing linguistic and archaeological evidence for seeing the appearance of human language with Australopithecus, between 4 and 3 million years ago. He is the author of more than 700 publications, including academic works on oral poetry, shamanism, anarchism, ethnophilology, the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, and the problem of landscape in literature. He is the general editor of the international journals "Philology", "Quaderni di Semantica" and "Quaderni di Filologia Romanza".
As a songwriter and harpist, he released 11 CDs, produced in Italy, Denmark and UK, reaching an international wide appeal. He represented Italian poetry and music in different international happenings, including the Rich Text Literature Festival in Cardiff, the Tradicionarius Festival in Barcelona, the Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, the Festival Literario de Madeira, and the Printemps des poètes He performed in Rome together with the Nobel Prize Wislawa Szymborska.

Discography