Marcello DiCintio, 2009 Magazine and 2005 Book Award Winner

Marcello was born in Calgary and studied Microbiology and English at the University of Calgary. He graduated in 1997 with a pair of degrees (BA and BSc).

His first book, Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa. Harmattan won the Henry Kriesel Award for Best First Book at the Alberta Book Awards. Since then, he published articles in numerous magazines and literary journals including The Walrus, EnRoute, Geist, and The Globe and Mail. His writing received several honours including the 2002 Maclean-Hunter Endowment Prize for Creative Non-fiction, and a number of Western and National Magazine Award nominations.

In 2009 Mr. DiCintio won the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for his article titled Walls of Shame published by Geist Magazine. It is an adaptation of a chapter from his book in progress about communities that live in the shadow of walls, fences and other "hard" barriers.

In 2005 Mr. DiCintio's winning submission was In the Holy City, Pilgrimage, a chapter from his book, Poets and Pahlevans: Travels in Iran, published in 2006 by Alfred A Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd. Knowing that there was a relationship between heroic poetry and various styles of traditional Persian wrestling, DiCintio set out to discover how Iranians "reconcile creativity with combat.".

DiCintio is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada, PEN Canada and the Writer's Guild of Alberta. He was the 2009-2010 Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.  His two latest books are Pay No Heed to the Rockets and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

@DiCintio
marcellodicintio.com
Geist Magazine winning article here
Penguin Random House
Book available here