Janine
Dickinson
PO
Box 1755
Rozelle
Sydney,
2039
Australia
Email.
convivioapartment@gmail.com
Jan
Dickinson acted for twenty years as a consultant to Italian companies with
business interests in Australia and with commercial interests in Rome and Florence, and a wide network of commercial and academic enterprise at all levels, in
both countries. She was for ten years, from 1990, a member of the committee of
the Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Queensland, to which she was elected for a two-year
term as President on March 16, 1999, and was honoured with life
membership.
She
was the first woman and the first non-Italian to serve as President of an
Italian Chamber of Commerce in Australia.
She was editor of ICCI News, and
Executive Editor of the Italian Food & Wine Guide. Her commercial
background is in sales and marketing, and she was a member of The Australian
Institute of Management.
She
holds a B.A. in European Literature with majors in history and Italian
literature, with post-graduate studies in cultural history and three years of
PhD research into the early Medici. She was a delegate to the early conferences
of 1988 on Multiculturalism and has been involved with issues of immigration
and ethnicity for many years. In addition, she has been a bookseller, works as
editor and translator of Italian academic publications, writes on Italian and
English literature, and was founding co-editor of the international Italian
academic journal, ConVivio: journal of ideas in Italian Studies.
She is a member
of The NSW Writers Centre. She has been, at various times involved with the
Brisbane Writers festival, and on one occasion was instrumental in establishing
a link with the Writers festival of Mantua, the Festivalletteratura. From 1990-95 she owned and operated Maria
Luisa Books at New Farm in Brisbane.
She worked as a translator of Italian books and articles, and lectured,
wrote and published on Italian culture both in Italy
and Australia, amongst which was the chapter on
Italians in post-war Qld. in the publication Multicultural Qld. 2001, published
by the Qld. Bureau of Ethnic affairs. She has been since 1988, a member of the
Dante Alighieri Society of which she is a life-member and a recipient of the
recognition of Benemerenza, and which
she served for nine years as Public Relations Officer, and which she is also
served for a term as Vice-President. She is an active participant in a wide
range of community issues and organisations.
From
2001-4 she held the position of Convenor on the board of the Italian
Consulate’s Progetto Leonardo
initiative, designed to heighten interaction between Italy and
Queensland—academically, commercially and culturally.
Her
principal involvement now is as a writer. Her first novel, The Sweet Hills Of Florence, about the Resistance and
the Partisans in Florence during the Civil War of 1943-45, was published in 2018. She is presently working on the next book, Magnifico: The Bonfires, about Florence and the early Medici.
She
was in 2004, the proud recipient of an Italian Knighthood, Cavaliere (III classe) dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarieta`
italiana.
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