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Lily Prior is a British novelist whose works are often "set in a lush, rural Italian landscape where women have scents that set the hillsides a-tingle and food has supernatural properties," as New York Times Book Review critic Liesl Schillinger noted. She is the author of La Cucina, Nectar, Ardour and Cabaret. Prior's books have been translated into French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish, among other languages. She divides her time between London and Italy.
Lily Prior's website
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How would you summarize La Cucina?
A delicious tale of risotto and rumpy-pumpy.
Describe your travels in Italy and how they related to the inspiration
for and creation of this book.
I knew from the very beginning that Sicily would be the setting for La
Cucin a larger-than-life backdrop for my larger-than-life heroine, Rosa Fiore.
This magical island has all the ingredients I needed: Mediterranean sun, light,
color and culture: intense heat inspiring intense passions; a culinary tradition
that exalts the concentrated flavors of the island's food; an air of mystery and
melancholy; the fascination of the mafia; the dark, deserted alleyways of
downtown Palermo; the danger and disappearances; the crumbling palazzi, the
quirky characters; curiosities like the miles of expensive autostrada on stilts
that lead precisely nowhere, and of course, the volcano; I like volcanoes.
What ideas came first in the process of writing this novel? Did you
conceive of the setting, the plot, or a particular character first?
What came first were the very clear ideas of the central characters, Rosa
and l'Inglese. Their shared passion for food was what led to their extraordinary
love affair, so the novel was always going to be ...
Diana Abu-Jaber is the award-winning author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including Crescent and The Language of Baklava. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (more)
Erica Bauermeister is the author of The School of Essential Ingredients (Jan 2009), a novel about eight students and their cooking teacher set in a restaurant kitchen. Her non-fiction work includes 500 Great Books by Women: A... (more)
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