Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director and writer. Born in Bologna, he began writing poems at the age of seven. A voracious reader, he was influenced by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis and Rimbaud. Pasolini studied literature at the University of Bologna, then one of Italy's most left-leaning cities, before publishing his first collection of poems in 1941. Increasingly Communist in his politics, Pasolini sought refuge during the Second World War in his childhood hometown of Casarsa. In 1947 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party, taking part in violent demonstrations which were later to inspire his novels and films. Pasolini's atheism, extreme political views and homosexuality made him a controversial figure, however; in 1949, he was charged with the corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places and expelled from the Party. He then moved to Rome, where he began working for the literature section of the Italian State radio. He published his first novel, Ragazzi di vita, to great acclaim in 1955, although it provoked a lawsuit against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti, by the Italian Government.

Pasolini began his film career in 1957, when he worked as a screenwriter on Federico Fellini's film Le Notti di Cabiria. In 1960 he made his début as an actor in Il gobbo. His first film as director and screenwriter was the controversial Accattone ('Panhandler', 1961), set in the seedy underworld of Rome. In 1963 his episode 'La ricotta', included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, led to the film-maker being tried for offence to the Italian state. Pasolini's other major film works include The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964), widely hailed the best cinematic adaptation of the life of Jesus; Uccellacci e uccellini ('The Hawks and the Sparrows', 1966); Theorem (1968); Il fiore delle mille e una notte ('Arabian Nights', 1974); Boccaccio's Decameron (1971); Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1972), and the Trilogy of Life. Pasolini's final work, Salo (1975), the first chapter in his planned Trilogy of Death, was widely condemned for its graphic, sadistic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, it remains his most controversial film; in May 2006, Time Out's Film Guide named it the Most Controversial Film of all time. His films were honoured at the Berlin, Cannes and Venice Film Festivals and won awards from the International Catholic Film Office and New York Film Critics' Circle.

Pasolini was brutally murdered on 2nd November 1975, run over by a male prostitute on the beach of Ostia, near Rome, a location typical of his novels. The circumstances of his death remain shrouded in mystery and controversy.