Luigi Mormino was born in Termini Imerese, Sicily, in 1935. He studied law and political sciences at Palermo University. Between 1961 and 1998, he worked at the secretariat of the European Parliament in Luxembourg, where he enjoyed a leading position in the Committee for Cultural Affairs, among other endeavours. He worked as a journalist for Italian and Luxembourgish radio and TV, including Radio Luxembourg (1969–1995) and Radio Latina (1995–1998). He hosted Buona Domenica on RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg and collaborated with La Notte and Il Giornale.
Together with his wife Inge Gerd Wilson, in 1972 Mormino founded the literary and cultural publishing house Club 80, which also included Edmond Dune and Roger Bertemes. In 1990 he was a member of the jury of the first European Biennial of Contemporary Printmaking in Diekirch.
One distinctive field of artistic expertise was photography. In 1994 he exhibited photos of his native Sicily at the Thomas Mann Library in Luxembourg. He followed this up with an exhibition in Brussels in 1996. In 2000 he published the illustrated work Eternal Sicily, prefaced by Dominique Fernández.
With considerable experience, an extensive network and a clear professional trajectory, Mormino carved out a position as an intermediary between languages and cultures. He published four collections in Italian – Certezze governate, La piccola memoria, Poesia del tempo breve and Poesie scelte – in which he set out philosophical reflections on the ephemeral nature of time and the timelessness of memory. He often used images of the Mediterranean for these works. Some of his poems also appeared in the publications Estuaries, Les Nouvelles Pages (SELF), La Dryade and Les Cahiers luxembourgeois, while still others were translated into French.
Mormino translated into Italian the poems and prose of Henri Sylvestre, Paul Celan, André Dorms, Michel Deguy, Edmond Dune, Jean-Claude Schneider, Jacques Réda, Louis Scutenaire and Jean-Claude Walter, along with anthologies of poetry from Provence, Alsace and Belgium.
Mormino passed away in 1999.
