While touring Victoria to discuss his acclaimed second novel The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni talked to our Digital Writer in Residence, Emma Andrews.
His first book The Fireflies of Autumn was published in 2018, sold 5,000 copies and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Immigrants has won The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction (2026) and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Readings Prize.
When I was 12 years old, I pestered my father to buy me a typewriter. I used to stay up late at night when mum and dad had gone to bed. And then I published my first book 51 years later!
It was always something I wanted to do. I always had a thing in the back of my head telling me ‘I’ve got to write this book.’ I didn’t know what the book was, but I knew I had to write it.
Once my own children were older, I didn’t need to work as a translator as much, so I decided ‘this is the time to do it’. I wanted to learn and observe what other people did and so I enrolled for a Masters of Creative Writing at RMIT.
I’d already had ‘A Short History of The Boy’ published in The Island. Incidentally that ended up inside The Immigrants. The last page and a half of the book is the ending of that short story. It was written more than ten years before it went into the book. Some of my favourite writers like Albert Camus do the same. So, I thought, if he can do it, why can’t I?
I never throw anything away. I’ve kept some little bits and pieces that I wrote as a teenager and some of those are going to go in the next book. I don’t believe that you kill your darlings. I believe you cherish them. All the bits that didn’t go into The Immigrants, I’ve got them; and I’ll use them one day.
How did you turn your short stories and notes into an actual manuscript?
I was learning and writing and getting a few short stories published here and there, including the RMIT Student Journal and The Island and then in 2016 I entered The Deborah Cass Prize for Migrant Writing, and I won it. I used the prize money to go to Italy where I spent a few weeks in the village I was writing about. The important part of the prize was that Black Inc would seriously consider the manuscript. And they did. And so my first book, The Fireflies of Autumn, was published.
It was one of the most traumatic things for me to submit the manuscript. I had to go through a psychological transformation before I could click submit. I immersed myself in the idea that it would be rejected. I knew that if I wanted to be published, I had to leave myself open to that possibility.
I was trying to work out who I am, where I come from, what I’m like, what my people are like, what my life is about, which a lot of writers probably do. And that’s where the second book, The Immigrants, came from:
There were various things that concerned me. For example, everybody thinks migrants come for a better life. And they do. But what happens if they don’t get a better life?
That’s where the memoir aspect of the book comes in, describing my family and the hard time we went through. The community. The town and the work on tobacco farms.
When I was 12 years old, I pestered my father to buy me a typewriter…and then I published my first book 51 years later! – Moreno Giovannoni
Have you had any feedback from anyone from the community you write about in the book?
It’s given me a lot of satisfaction that people have responded the way they have. People cry when they read the book. They say the story breaks their heart at different times, and it reminds them of what life was like. They love it for those reasons.
The population has changed a lot. At the time, out of 1,200 tobacco growers in North East Victoria, 800 were Italian. I wanted to make sure that there was a way of remembering it.
Is it a homage to that time and that culture?
Absolutely! As with the first book. A homage to the life my grandparents lived.
So despite all this, despite the impact your writing is having on people, and ideas for several other books, you still don’t consider yourself a writer. Is that correct?
That’s true.
When I was doing the Masters in Creative Writing, they suggested that I start to think of myself as a writer. I don’t feel the need to think of myself as a writer in order to write. It’s just something I do.
A lot of writers think they have to keep it all to themselves until it’s ready to see the world. But I loved telling everybody everything that I was thinking and doing and writing and showing them and asking for feedback.
So I don’t follow that rule. There are no rules. Whatever works for you is okay. The aim is to write The Book or story. And whatever helps you do that, just do it.
You can meet Moreno for yourself at one of his upcoming book signings or readings, or by joining his Writers Victoria workshop in partnership with Connected Libraries on 11 October.