Francesca Sanvitale (17 May 1928 – 9 February 2011) was an Italian novelist and journalist, "one of Italy's most renowned contemporary authors".[1]

Francesca Sanvitale

Life

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Born in Milan, Francesca Sanvitale lived in Florence for two decades, gaining a degree there in Italian literature before moving to Rome in 1961.[2] She wrote television plays and contributed to cultural programmes for RAI.[3]

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.[2] The protagonist in Sanvitale's third novel, L'uomo del parco (1984), attempted to find the truth about herself through psychoanalysis.[3] 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.[4]

She died in Rome.

Works

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  • 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

References

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  1. ^ Simon Wright, 'Francesca Sanvitale', in Augustus Pallotta et al., eds., Italian Novelists Since World War II. Columbia: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1997, p. 220-229. Dictionary of Literary Biography 177.
  2. ^ a b Dawn Green, 'Francesca Sanvitale', in Jane Eldridge Miller, ed., Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing, p.289
  3. ^ a b 'Francesca Sanvitale (born 1929)', in Claire Buck, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, p. 989
  4. ^ Premio Viareggio: trionfa Francesca Sanvitale con il romanzo "L'inizio è in autunno" Archived 29 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Italia News, 29 August 2008
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