Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 to Italian parents. He died in Italy in 1985.
I discovered Calvino’s work around 1988 at the University of Texas at Austin, in an English class called “Magic Realism,” which is as good of a label as any for his writing. I prefer “fantastic literature” or “fabulism,” but consider the terms broadly synonymous. We studied Calvino alongside the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other international authors.
At the Italian Cultural Institute of New York in 2017, commemorating Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, it was stated that “Italo Calvino is one of the few Italian writers of the late 20th century who was well known also outside Italy. And not only in the literary world. His fiction and non-fiction works — often not always easy to distinguish — inspired writers, architects, designers, philosophers, etcetera.”