Grazia Deledda

Deledda grew up in Nuoro, in Sardinia's mountainous interior, with four years of formal schooling; the family spoke Sardinian, so she taught herself literary Italian from whatever books reached town and published her first story in a Roman magazine at seventeen: a small local scandal for a respectable girl.

Marriage to a civil servant took her to Rome in 1900, where she kept an unbroken discipline: a novel nearly every year for three decades (Elias Portolu, Ashes, Reeds in the Wind (1913)): shepherds, priests, and lovers transgressing an archaic moral law and paying for it, watched by an unforgiving island.

The 1926 Nobel praised writings that 'with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island.' She kept her quiet Roman routine to the end, dying in 1936 of the illness she had already given to a character in her final novel.