Tuesday 15 March 2011

Claudio H. Martelli, Past President of Trieste PEN Centre, has passed away.




It is with deep sorrow that I have to announce that my dear friend and colleague Claudio H. Martelli, Past President of PEN Club Trieste, has passed away yesterday night after a long, brave fight with his illness.

Claudio – a many-sided personality, if any - has been a poet, a writer, an essayist, an author of theatre, a journalist, a publisher of books and of his review Trieste Artecultura.

He has been for decades a scholar and a critic in the field of figurative arts and he has edited and published a Dictionary of the Artists of Trieste, Gorizia, Istria and Dalmatia. His poems have been published in many anthologies in Italy and abroad.

A founder of the Trieste PEN Centre in 2003, he has been its first Vice President and the second President. Recently he decided to step down in view of his state of health. At present he was Past President and we all hoped to avail ourselves of his experience for a long time.

I would like to recall that it has been Claudio who conceived the idea of our InterPENbooks, that found its first realization in 2008 in cooperation with the Slovene PEN and will shortly see the second issue in cooperation with the Croatian PEN.

We and his relatives will remember him as a good man as well as a firm believer in the principles of PEN and a passionate advocate of the multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual approach of the Trieste PEN Centre of International PEN.



Antonio Della Rocca
on behalf of the PEN Club Trieste