Academic, civil servant at the Ministry of Finance, communist militant, he distinguished himself through essays, the SF genre and the historical thriller, through the cycle that made him famous, the one dedicated to the ruthless inquisitor Nicolas Eymerich, " a total schizoid,” in his words.
Without forgetting several novels on the Mexican Revolution (Evangelisti had lived part of the year in the state of Oaxaca since 2003, where he had a house), including
La Coulée de feu,
and the series
Métal hurlant,
started in 1998. Among his influences are the novels of Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight (author of
To Serve Man
), Dos Passos, Steinbeck, James Ellroy, and popular French literature.
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His first successes date from the early 1990s with the publication of the first volume of his "Nicolas Eymerich" saga, translated into fifteen countries, and which comprises no less than twelve volumes, the last of which appeared in 2018 (
Le Fantôme of Eymerich
).
Confirmed enthusiasm for this prolix author, with, still in the 1990s, the publication of the first part of his trilogy devoted to Nostradamus,
Le Présage,
sold more than 100,000 copies in Italy.
The three volumes were brought together in 2000, under the title
Magus.
Il Romanzo di Nostradamus
.
We also owe him an "American Trilogy", followed by a "Cycle of pirates", which earned him the qualifier of "serial writer", he who affirmed that the principle of the series or the cycle
“illustrates nothing less than the role of memory in the constitution of identity.”
And in 2001, in the daily
La Repubblica
, he declared:
“The good novelist is like a rat that sniffs out every nook and cranny.
It is in the cellars that novels are born and not from a hypothetical contact with the gods.
On the sidelines of this vast romantic work, Valerio Evangelisti was also interested, through essays, in the Bonnot gang, the punks, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and the "Jacobin plebs" during the Revolution.
For his translator Serge Quadrappani,
"Valerio's ability to play with the canons of SF, thriller, soap opera, western, fantasy, worked wonders."
Most of his novels have been translated by Rivages, as well as Métailié, and La Volte.