Natalia Ginzburg

Born Natalia Levi in Palermo to a Jewish family of scientists, she was raised in Turin among the anti-fascist intelligentsia gathered around her father's dinner table. Race laws barred her from publishing under her own name, so her first novel appeared in 1942 under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparte. She married Leone Ginzburg, an anti-fascist intellectual and founding editor at Einaudi; captured by Fascist police, he died from torture in a Roman prison in 1944, leaving her a widow with three children in wartime hiding.

She spent decades afterward as an editor at Einaudi, working alongside Pavese and Calvino, while writing spare, unadorned novels of family and loss: Voices in the Evening, assembled from a small town's overheard gossip, and Family Lexicon (1963), which won the Strega Prize by reconstructing her own family purely through its private catchphrases. She entered Italian politics in 1983 as an independent left deputy and kept writing into her seventies.