Gero Mannella

Gero Mannella was born in Italy, in the shadow of the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples, in the radiant 1960s.
In the 1970s he moves to the sun.
A graphomaniac from an early age, he writes with a typewriter with some missing vowels, which he replaces with a round of consonants.
These balancing acts bring him closer to puns, hyperbole, non-sense, mental short-circuits, and consequent fires (but also to wall fire extinguishers).
For work he is a software engineer, switching from typewriter to personal computer, but even on that keyboard he cannot find vowels, so he writes software without using them, i.e. sftwr.
In 1997 he is a finalist for the Italo Calvino Literary Prize.
During the award night Gero Mannella sits in the second row, right behind the good soul of the great philosopher Norberto Bobbio, and throughout the evening he is struck by his huge earcups.
He tries to measure them by discreetly placing a pen next to them, but his gesture is interpreted by the speaker on stage as a request to speak. So, he invites him with a “You're welcome!”
The surprised Mannella plays dumb, which costs him defeat in the finals.
He goes through a period of aphasia in which he takes up the study of the jazz trumpet, playing it in the closet to muffle the clamor.
Nevertheless, his neighbors are annoyed, and one day they break into the house hidden by ku klux klan-style hoods, and liquefy the trumpet in an acid solution they invented, for which they are nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Gero Mannella is invited to the final evening, he sits in the second row, right behind a philosopher with huge earcups, but he decides to change seats.
He returns to humor writing in the form of short stories.
He is a finalist in the 2005 Massimo Troisi Award and in the 2006 at Mitreo Film Festival with the screenplay of two short films.
In 2006 he published the short story collection Don't Throw Corpses Out the Window, in 2012 The Qwerty Killer, and in 2017 A Skeleton from the Closet.