Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art" Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Dino Buzzati-Traverso was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel The Tartar Steppe, although he is also known for his well-received collections of short stories.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Matilde Serao was an Italian journalist and novelist. She was the first woman called to edit an Italian newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma and later Il Giorno. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the newspaper Il Mattino, and the author of several novels. She never won the Nobel Prize in Literature despite being nominated on six occasions.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Dacia Maraini is an Italian writer. Maraini's work focuses on women's issues, and she has written numerous plays and novels. She has won awards for her work, including the Formentor Prize for L'età del malessere (1963); the Premio Fregene for Isolina (1985); the Premio Campiello and Book of the Year Award for La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990); and the Premio Strega for Buio (1999). In 2013, Irish Braschi's biographical documentary I Was Born Travelling told the story of her life, focusing in particular on her imprisonment in a concentration camp in Japan during World War II and the journeys she made around the world with her partner Alberto Moravia and close friends Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas. In 2020 she adheres to Empathism.
Elsa Osorio is an Argentinian novelist and film/television screenwriter. Osorio was born in Buenos Aires in 1953, and lived in Madrid, Spain, for 14 years before returning to Argentina in 2006.
Angela Bianchini was an Italian fiction writer and literary critic of Jewish descent. She grew up in Italy and emigrated to the United States in 1941, after Mussolini's openly anti-Semitic racial laws were enacted.
Jennifer Clement is an American-Mexican author. Clement has written several novels, including Gun Love (2018) and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), and published several collections of poetry. She was the first woman president of PEN International in 2015.
Susanna Tamaro is an Italian novelist and film director. She is an author of novels, stories, magazine articles, and children's literature. Her novel Va' dove ti porta il cuore was a bestseller, translated into 44 languages, and received the 1994 Premio Donna Citta di Roma.
Antonio Porta was an author and poet and one of the founders of the Italian literary movement Gruppo 63.
Paola Calvetti is an Italian novelist and journalist.
Alawiya Sobh is a Lebanese writer and author.
Francesca Sanvitale was an Italian novelist and journalist, "one of Italy's most renowned contemporary authors".
Laudomia Bonanni was an Italian writer and journalist. Although she started publishing when she was a teenager, her literary career took off in 1948 when she won a national contest; she went on to be a prolific and award-winning author. The Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale compared her realism to James Joyce’s Dubliners, and other distinguished critics considered her one of the most important and original voices in Italy’s post-World War II literature.
Anna Maria Ortese was an Italian author of novels, short stories, poetry, and travel writing. Born in Rome, she grew up between southern Italy and Tripoli, with her formal education ending at age thirteen. Her first book, Angelici dolori, was issued in 1937. In 1953 her third collection, Il mare non bagna Napoli, won the coveted Viareggio Prize; thereafter, Ortese's stories, novels, and journalism received many of the most distinguished Italian literary awards, including the Strega and the Fiuggi. Although she lived for many years in Naples following the Second World War, she also resided in Milan, in Rome, and for most of the last twenty years of her life in Rapallo. L'iguana, Ortese’s best-known work in English translation, was published in 1987 as The Iguana by the American literary press McPherson & Company. As of 2023, what she considered as her most important work, the novel Il porto di Toledo (1975), had not been translated into English yet.
Edith Bruck is a Hungarian-born writer, director and Holocaust survivor. She has lived most of her life in Italy and writes in Italian.
Laura Mancinelli was an Italian writer, germanist, medievalist and university professor.
Silvia Avallone is an Italian novelist and poet.
Astrid Ahnfelt (1876–1962) was a Swedish author, translator, foreign correspondent, and journal editor who wrote short stories and novels in both Swedish and Italian. She is remembered principally for fostering cultural exchanges between Sweden and Italy. Her novel I blindo (1908) about Swedes living in Italy is partly autobiographical.
