Author of Dear Wall

Maria Rago

Maria Rago has spent her working life in one language, and it was not English. Piano first, then film scores, then orchestral composition: twenty years of writing for people who would hear the result rather than read it. What kept returning in that work was a single question about who gets listened to, and
who only gets described.

Then she came across Fernando Oreste Nannetti, entered into a Roman ledger in 1927 under two letters meaning no name, and the nurse who spent decades copying his carved wall into notebooks nobody had asked him to keep. Dear Wall is her first novel. This story asked for a different language, and she chose words instead of music.

“The record keeps the buildings, the admission books and the diagnoses. Fiction is where you can stand close enough to hear the person in front of the stone.”