“I have worked all my life for the pleasure of being able to speak, of being able to educate myself. My father used to say: in life, poverty is ugly, but a poor ignorant person has something tragic about it.” Gesuino Némus, born Matteo Locci, is one of the great newcomers to Italian crime fiction in the last decade. Raised in one of the poorest villages in Sardinia, he became an avid reader and transformed life’s adversities into opportunities to enrich his own wealth of experiences. At the age of sixteen he arrived in Milan (“a London where everything was possible and where everything happened”) to find work. In fifty years he has held dozens of jobs: farmer, editor, porter and, more recently, writer. He made his mark on the scene starting with La teologia del cinghiale, a work between a coming-of-age novel and a regional crime novel, overflowing with themes, settings, characters and linguistic registers that earned him some of the major national literary awards within a few months of its release. His unconventional talent and his prose “rich in storytelling” positively impressed critics and readers. He later published I bambini sardi non piangono mai, considered the best Italian crime novel of 2016 and winner of the Franco Fedeli Award, Ora Pro Loco (2017) and Il catechismo della pecora (2019), three crime novels that take up the setting and characters of La teologia del cinghiale.