Antonio Tabucchi

Tabucchi discovered his life's subject almost by accident, finding a French translation of a Fernando Pessoa poem on a Paris bookstall as a student; he learned Portuguese specifically to read Pessoa in the original, and went on to become one of Pessoa's leading translators and scholars, teaching Portuguese literature at the University of Siena for decades.

He split his life between Italy and Lisbon, married to the Portuguese literary historian Maria José de Lancastre. Pereira Maintains (1994), his best-known novel, uses a deposition-like repeated refrain to recount an apolitical journalist's quiet radicalization under Salazar's dictatorship: a story widely read, on publication, as a veiled warning about Berlusconi-era Italy.

Tabucchi died in Lisbon, the city that shaped nearly everything he wrote, in 2012.