Natalia Ginzburg

Italian novelist, essayist and playwright (1916–1991), born Natalia Levi in Palermo and raised in Turin, the daughter of the Jewish scientist Giuseppe Levi. She married the anti-fascist intellectual Leone Ginzburg, who died under Nazi custody in Rome in 1944; she worked as an editor at Einaudi for much of her life. Ginzburg's spare, morally attentive prose is best known through the autobiographical Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon, 1963), winner of the Strega Prize, and the novels Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening, 1961), Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1973) and La città e la casa (The City and the House, 1984). She also wrote plays and the essay collection Le piccole virtù. She served in the Italian parliament as an independent from 1983.