Our Saga

My full name is Magnus Christian Aurelio Lanciai, Christian Lanciai is the name I use while I use Magnus Aurelio for a pen name. I was born in Helsingfors (Helsinki, capital of Finland) in 1951 as an Italian Citizen, my grandfather being an Italian from Verona, where I still have my greatest number of relatives. I am the youngest of four children, three brothers and a sister, and Swedish is our mother tongue, since we belong to the Swedish minority of Finland. My father worked for the Finnish Paper Mills Association, and since he was ambitious and knew a number of languages fluently (Swedish, Finnish, German, English and Spanish) he got the job of executive director of the Finland-South America Line in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1952 wherefore we had to resettle there., I was not yet one year old, so I never learned Finnish much to my regret later on, while my eldest brother had some time to learn a bit of it, and in Argentina all my siblings could learn both Spanish and English at school while I was too young for that.

Later on I compensated this want in my education by privately studying English meticulously and also Italian, French, German, Latin, Greek and a bit of Russian. We didn't stay long in Argentina however, although my father had planned to stay there in a safe position for life, but in 1955 the dictator Perón nationalized all foreign companies, and my father found himself out of work. With four children and a wife to support he had to quickly find a new position, and that's how we all ended up in Gothenburg, Sweden, then a prosperous city with one of the world's greatest shipyards, where he could continue working with paper export, mainly of Finnish paper, in a position which became the longest of his life.

As we were Catholics because of my grandfather, I went to a Catholic school but later went on to more advanced studies and started at the university studying English, which was interrupted by my having to support myself and started a job as an organist in my Catholic church. I was already a pianist, having studied the piano for 5 years, and I then also had piano pupils for 15 years. Later I was also ordained as an organist in the Gothenburg synagogue, but I also continued working for the music in another protestant church for 25 years. So my commitment to music and literature has always been parallel. My first ambition however was for literature when I at 8 was acquainted with Shakespeare for the first time, which made me decide to become an author. 

That is about it. Music became my main livelihood while I always kept on writing and studying. I was never married, I nearly was once, but I prefer to keep friends. So I am an old incorrigible bachelor who nevertheless always worked hard on minimal salaries, and I am afraid I am rather a workaholic, which at the age of 73 seems hopelessly incurable.

I started writing poems in English not before 2006, although I had written a few earlier. The collection of "October Harvest" was compiled in autumn 2017, but the first part contains chiefly poems from 2006 to 2008. The second part will be more extensive.