Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Tomasi di Lampedusa was born into one of Sicily's oldest aristocratic families in Palermo, fought and was taken prisoner in the First World War, escaped his captors, and walked much of the way home across a defeated Europe. He lived most of his adult life quietly, giving informal private lectures on English and French literature to a small circle of young relations, including the cousin he later adopted as his heir.

Only in his late fifties, ill with the disease that would become lung cancer, did he write The Leopard, drawing his aristocratic prince from his own great-grandfather during Sicily's absorption into a unified Italy. Both major Italian publishers rejected the manuscript in his lifetime; he died in 1957 without knowing it would be published. Giorgio Bassani rescued it from a drawer, Feltrinelli printed it in 1958, and it won the Strega Prize the following year: Italy's most read twentieth-century novel, and its author's only one.