nelsonmarcelino

Nelson Marcelino is a writer drawn to people whose intelligence outlasted the records written against them.

He studied Latin and French at university and has spent his adult life reading in classical history and European literature. His novels are built from primary sources — the moralists, the memoirists, the letter-writers who recorded a century while living inside it.

Messalina: Before the Verdict, his first novel, began as a question: why does every ancient source that condemned Valeria Messalina also benefit from her condemnation? Answering it became a years-long project in classical sources, Renaissance essayists, and the problem of writing a complete interior life for a woman who left no documents in her own hand.

Ninon: A Defence of Pleasure, his second, moves from Rome to the Paris of Louis XIV — and to a woman with the opposite difficulty. Ninon de Lenclos was admired by everyone who met her and understood by almost none of them. The novel sets down, in her own voice, the system of desire she spent sixty years working out and never wrote down.

He lives in Washington, Michigan.