For the Italian Argentine writer, invention can become a more honest path to personal experience.
Buenos Aires
Sebastiano Mauri has returned to Argentina to participate in FILBA with a body of work built around identity, displacement, family memory and the unstable boundary between autobiography and fiction. The Italian writer, filmmaker and visual artist argues that fiction is not necessarily a retreat from truth. It can be a way of approaching it more directly.
That idea is central to La nueva tierra, a novel whose protagonist travels to the Peruvian Amazon after his life begins to lose stability. Mauri acknowledges that the story contains clear echoes of his own experiences, but he resists reducing it to autobiography. The fictional structure gives him distance from literal fact while allowing him to explore emotions, wounds and contradictions that might be harder to confront under his own name.
His creative philosophy is shaped by cinema as much as literature. Mauri studied film in New York and spent 15 years there before returning to Europe. That background influences the way he constructs scenes, characters and emotional credibility. He writes fiction so that the reader can temporarily believe it is real, even while knowing that the story has been deliberately constructed.
Identity itself is similarly unstable in Mauri’s biography. He was born in Milan in 1972 to an Italian father and an Argentine mother, learned Spanish later in childhood and continues to write primarily in Italian. Argentina nevertheless remains part of his personal geography through Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos and his maternal family. That distance between language and belonging has become one of the recurring tensions in his work.
His earlier novel Disfruta el problema approached the recognition of homosexuality and its consequences for family and social relationships. Later, La nueva tierra turned toward existential dislocation, transformation and the search for meaning. Across both works, Mauri repeatedly uses individual experience to reach broader questions about freedom, belonging and self knowledge.
His participation in FILBA will also include a writing workshop focused on transforming personal experiences into fiction. The premise reflects his own method: reality provides the emotional material, but fiction reorganizes it until private experience becomes communicable to others.
Mauri’s proposition is ultimately less paradoxical than it first appears. Literal accuracy and emotional truth are not always the same thing. Sometimes changing names, places or events can remove the defenses that prevent a writer from confronting what actually mattered.
Fiction, in that sense, is not the opposite of truth. It can be one of the instruments used to reach it.
Narrative is power too.