Paolo Giordano

During this BorderKitchen, Paolo will be interviewed about his latest essay 'How contagion works'.

Paolo Giordano (Turin, 1982) is a physicist and an internationally bestselling novelist. Giordano has received many awards for his debut novel The solitude of prime numbers, including the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello Opera Prima. It has sold over a million copies and was translated into forty languages. His second novel, The human body, was released in 2013. Like family, was released in 2014. In 2018 he released his fourth novel, Heaven and earth.

In cooperation with publisher De Bezige Bij, 'How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness and Community in Times of Global Crises'. An urgent, elegant and hopeful essay from the author of ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’ and ‘Heaven and Earth’, about the virus that has gripped the world.

The Covid-19 epidemic is set to be the most significant health emergency of our time. It’s boldness has revealed something we had long known but had been unable to measure with precision until now: the multiple levels and layers that connect us to each other, everywhere, and the complexity of the world we inhabit – its social, political, financial motives and its interpersonal and psychological structures, too. The way in which the virus has spread shows how connected we all are. The pandemic encourages us all to look at the world as one big society and it forces us to acknowledge that individual choices have consequences towards everyone. The society that we have to focus on right now, is the entire human race.

'How contagion works' is a rallying cry inspired by the recent CoV-19 epidemic. The short essay was born out of the article 'The Mathematics of Contagion'. which Paolo wrote for Italy's largest newspaper in February 2020, at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. The article was shared over 4 million times in Italy and 'How contagion works' is now being published in over 24 countries worldwide.