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Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was born in Alexandria, Egypt into an Italian family, where he was educated in French and began working as a journalist and literary critic. Ungaretti moved to Paris in 1912, but enlisted in the infantry in World War I and fought in the trenches in Northern Italy. World War I served as the catalyst for Ungaretti's venture into poetry, and he published his first collection of poetry in 1916. Among his many affiliations, Ungaretti's works were influenced by Dadaism, Hermeticism (of which he helped to revoluntionize in the 1930s), Symbolism, and Futurism, among others. Ungaretti is the first laureate of the Neustadt Prize, he won the prestigious literary prize in 1970.