Lisa Clifford grew up in Sydney. She moved to Italy when she was sixteen years old and returned to Australia after winning a scholarship to the Australian, Film, Television and Radio School. Following a career in journalism that includes reporting for 2GB, Mix FM and Channel 10 news, Lisa was associate producer of the Channel 10 Late News. Throughout her career, she continued to travel to Italy, corresponding for 2UE, the ABC’s Radio National and the Voice of America News Service. Lisa contributes opinion pieces, guides and lifestyle articles on Italy to The Australian, The Australian Financial review, Gourmet Traveler and a range of other magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Walking Sydney and The Promise - an Italian Romance and Death in the Mountains. Lisa lives in Florence with her husband and two children.
In 2009, Lisa was named the winner of the Australian Victorian Premier's Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia. Here's what the judges had to say about Death in the Mountains.
The world of the Italian peasant, hundreds of years in the making, is difficult to describe to the modern reader, as it is overlain with the memories and misconceptions that are mixed up in the migration process. In Death in the Mountains, Lisa Clifford intricately re-creates an almost forgotten world of a rural Italy, a world of peasant mezzadri (sharecroppers) governed by poverty, hard work, frugality and resourcefulness in which adversity is sometimes paradoxically mediated by both religion and superstition. The key factual events, particularly the murder of the family's paterfamilias, Artemio Bruni, are located within a vivid reconstruction of the occluded world inhabited by these mezzadri. The details are astonishingly good, based on careful interviews with the descendants of Artemio and Bruna and their contemporaries, now very old people living on the margins of an Italian region better known for its glamorous villas and majestic urbanscapes. By drawing readers into the world of the Italian mezzadro peasant the story of the Bruni family, Clifford provides insight into the values, attitudes and ways that helped define the Italian peasantry and which subsequently moulded the lives of Italians both in Australia and Italy.
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Death in the Mountains - WINNERLisa Clifford The world of the Italian peasant, hundreds of years in the making, is difficult to describe to the modern reader, as it is overlain with the memories and misconceptions that are mixed up in the migration process. In Death in the Mountains, Lisa Clifford intricately re-creates an almost forgotten world of a rural Italy, a world of peasant mezzadri (sharecroppers) governed by poverty, hard work, frugality and resourcefulness in which adversity is sometimes paradoxically mediated by both religion and superstition. The key factual events, particularly the murder of the family's paterfamilias, Artemio Bruni, are located within a vivid reconstruction of the occluded world inhabited by these mezzadri. The details are astonishingly good, based on careful interviews with the descendants of Artemio and Bruna and their contemporaries, now very old people living on the margins of an Italian region better known for its glamorous villas and majestic urbanscapes. By drawing readers into the world of the Italian mezzadro peasant the story of the Bruni family, Clifford provides insight into the values, attitudes and ways that helped define the Italian peasantry and which subsequently moulded the lives of Italians both in Australia and Italy. |
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