Francesca Sanvitale

Francesca Sanvitale (17 May 1928 – 9 February 2011) was an Italian novelist and journalist, "one of Italy's most renowned contemporary authors".

Life

Born in Milan, Francesca Sanvitale lived in Florence for two decades, gaining a degree there in Italian literature before moving to Rome in 1961. She wrote television plays and contributed to cultural programmes for RAI.

Her first novel was Il cuore borghese (1972). Madre e figlia (1980), a semi-autobiographical novel about an intense relationship between a mother and her illegitimate child, won both the Fregene Prize and the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize. The protagonist in Sanvitale's third novel, L'uomo del parco (1984), attempted to find the truth about herself through psychoanalysis. As well as other novels, Sanvitale collected short stories in La realtà è un dono (1987) and Separazioni (1997). L'inizio è in autunno won the Viareggio Prize in 2008.

She died in Rome.

Works

Il cuore borghese [The bourgeois heart], 1972

Madre e figlia, 1980

L'uomo del parco: romanzo [The man in the heart], 1984

La realtà è un dono: racconti [Reality is a gift: stories], 1987

Mettendo a fuoco : pagine di letteratura e realtà, 1988

(tr.) Il diavolo in corpo by Raymond Radiguet, 1989. Translated from the French Le Diable au corps (1923)

Verso Paola, 1991

Il figlio dell'Impero, 1993

Tre favole dell'ansia e dell'ombra, 1994

Separazioni [Separations], 1997

Camera ottica: pagine di letteratura e realtà, 1999

L'ultima casa prima del bosco, 2003

L'inizio è in autunno, 2008