Jonathan Galassi (m. 1971), was born in 1949 and graduated from Harvard in 1971 having won a Marshall Scholarship to study at Christ’s College, where he realised that he wanted a career in book publishing. He graduated in 1973 with a BA in English, and immediately moved back to America, landing his first job at Houghton Mifflin in Boston. He then moved to Random House in New York and on to Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), where he is now the President and Publisher. FSG publishes many lauded authors, including T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. Jonathan Franzen’s bestseller Freedom is dedicated to Galassi.
However, Galassi does not just publish books – he writes his own. He is a well-respected poet, and has published four collections of his poems over the last twenty-five years. In 1989, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his creative ability. He also specialises in the translation of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale.