Who’s ANAKINA?

Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.

She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, scientific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor’s assistant in the field of ecology at Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia of the University of Cagliari.

She has written original fiction since 2009.

In 2012-2013 she wrote and published a hard science fiction series set on Mars and titled Deserto rosso.

The whole Deserto rosso series was also published as omnibus in December 2013 and hit No. 1 on the Italian Kindle Store in November 2014.

Deserto rosso was published in English, with the title Red Desert, between 2014 and 2015.

It includes the following books: Red Desert - Point of No Return, Red Desert - People of Mars, Red Desert - Invisible Enemy, and Red Desert - Back Home.

She also authored three crime thrillers in the Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy – The Mentor (Il mentore, 2014), Syndrome (Sindrome, 2016), and Beyond the Limit (Oltre il limite, 2017) –, an action thriller titled Kindred Intentions (Affinità d’intenti, 2015), five more science fiction novels – L’isola di Gaia (2014), Per caso (2015), Ophir. Codice vivente (2016), Sirius. In caduta libera (2018), and Nave stellare Aurora (2020) – and a non-fiction book titled Self-publishing lab. Il mestiere dell’autoeditore (2020).

Her crime thriller The Mentor was first published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015 and became an international bestseller, hitting No. 1 on the Kindle Store in the USA, UK, and Australia in October 2015. A new edition of The Mentor was published in November 2022. Syndrome and Beyond the Limit followed in February and May 2023.

She’s also a podcaster at FantascientifiCast, an Italian podcast about science fiction, an Italian Representative of Mars Initiative, and a member of the International Thriller Writers organization.

She’s often a guest both in Italy and abroad during book fairs, including Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (Turin Book Fair) and Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair), local publishing events as well as university conferences, where she gives speeches about self-publishing and genre fiction writing. She also taught a class on self-publishing at the University of Insubria (Varese, Italy) between 2016 and 2022.

Her books have been reviewed or recommended by national magazines and newspapers such as Wired Italia, Tom’s Hardware Italia, La Repubblica, Tiscali News and Global Science (magazine of the Italian Space Agency).

As a science fiction and Star Wars fan (especially of the classic trilogy), she is known in the Italian online community by her nickname, Anakina.

Member of