Irene Perali
Irene Perali is the author of Followives, a women's fiction novel published on Amazon.
Irene is also an engineer in Silicon Valley and works on technology development for autonomous vehicles.
Before joining the tech industry, Irene pursued a Ph.D. in electronics from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Her research was focused on medical instrumentation and she co-authored several scientific papers.
Story of Irene Perali
Three lives and a half
Irene always says that she lived three lives and a half: the villager, the urban, the European-this is the half life-and the Californian.
THE VILLAGER LIFE
Irene was born and raised in Northern Italy. Cologne (BS) is a small town in Lombardy surrounded by cornfields on one side and factories on the other side.
During her childhood, Irene knew one thing with certainty: she loved school. School, there is no better place to find new writing prompts every week! She was probably the only child in the world who loved homework as much as free time.
Not only she loved humanistic subjects, she also loved math and physics. Driven by more certain career perspectives-it's never too late to become a writer-she decided to follow her scientific inclination and study Engineering in Milan.
THE URBAN LIFE
Irene moved to Milan when she was nineteen years old to study Biomedical Engineering and Electronics Engineering.
"Milan is the the city that made me the person I am today." She often says.
However, writing didn't play a major role during those years. Yes, she wrote a lot, but only scientific papers and her doctoral thesis. Writing her thesis taught her a methodology to complete a big project, an experience she found useful when she started writing fiction.
THE EUROPEAN HALF LIFE
2015 was a year of transition. Irene lived in seven different homes, four cities, three countries and two continents.
After accepting a full-time position at Apple, Irene spent five months in Zurich waiting for her visa. The time at Zurich was "the Erasmus project I never did when I was at school."
They were five happy months, mostly spent reading in Zurich's parks.
THE CALIFORNIAN LIFE
On October 12th 2015, Irene landed in San Francisco to start a new life. In San Francisco, she met her husband; but this is another story. The first year was the year of the infinite weekends alone. During one of those weekends, she decided to do something she never had time to do before, she attended a creative writing course. She rediscovered an old passion: homework.
To practice her English, she wrote her first novel, still unpublished. She continued to attend more courses and study writing techniques.
In 2018, she decided to participate in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and succeeded in the challenge of writing 50000 words in a month. This was the first draft of Followives.