Hello. If you’re here, you are probably trying to find out who I am and what I do. Good luck with that, I’ve been trying to answer those questions all my life.
Here’s some basic facts, though. Reach out if you want to know more, or let’s have coffee if you live in NYC.
I was born and raised in Palermo – the one in Italy, in Sicily, not the barrio in Buenos Aires. Here’s a map, just in case. And that’s an amazing place to grow up, especially if one enjoys studying greek, latin, art and philosophy in high school, or being able to jump into the Mediterranean in February on a bet (ok, that was only once).
Much to the chagrin of my greek teacher, I went on studying bioengineering – probably because I’d had too little maths&physics until then – in Milan and in Paris. To somewhat less chagrin of my biomechanics professor, after graduating I got a job in management consulting.
I spent five years being shuttled around the world (Paris, Copenhagen, London, Rome, Milan, Karlsruhe, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Moscow, Mexico City, New York, Bruxelles, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Miami, São Paulo and I’m probably forgetting some) to work with all sort of clients and assignments, from the very glamorous (luxury fragrances and fashion) to the… less glamorous (urology devices) until I decided to settle down and went to work for a Brazilian bank for a few years.
Banking was fun, especially when things went very wrong and then back, and it even left me some spare time to write – I published this with my father, which according to a wise friend was probably cheaper and faster than therapy. But it couldn’t last, could it?
You know that classic, basic story of the entrepreneur that cannot find something he wants and then decides to start up a company to do it? Yup. That was me, shopping for furniture in Brazil, a country that has beautiful hardwoods but an annoying tendency to just export raw commodities. So I made furniture, beautifully and most of all sustainably, with a plant in the middle of the Amazon region and a store/gallery/cultural hang in São Paulo.
Meanwhile, I got married, we had two kids, she got transferred to New York, we all moved, I became a writer.
Ok, ok, slower. One day, my pal João wrote a short. He needed a French-speaking actor and thought of me – as a French speaker, I assume, because an actor at that point I was not. Aaaand… it went well. We started writing stuff together. We got a prize. So here I am now, with over twenty new projects in development, a novel just finished and two more in the making, because if one really likes greek literature as a teenager, it’s unlikely he’ll be happy working with spreadsheets for too long. Even if spreadsheets are amazing, in a way.
I also bake sourdough, if you really need to know about hobbies.
Carlo Calabrò 