Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda
Born	27 September 1871(1871-09-27) Nuoro, Italy
Died	15 August 1936(1936-08-15) (aged 64) Rome, Italy
Occupation	Writer, novelist
Literary movement	Realism, Decadence
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1926

Grazia Deledda (September 27, 1871 – August 15, 1936) was an Italian writer whose works won her the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926.

Biography

Born in Nuoro, into a bourgeois family, she attended elementary school and then was educated by a private tutor (a guest of one of her relatives) and moved on to study literature on her own.

She first published some novels on the magazine L'ultima moda when it still published works in prose and poetry. Nell'azzurro, published by Trevisani in 1890 might be considered as her first work.

Still between prose and poetry are, among the first works, Paesaggi sardi, published by Speirani in 1896. In 1900, after having married Palmiro Madesani, functionary of the Ministry of War met in Cagliari in the October of 1899, the writer moved to Rome and after the publishing of Anime oneste in 1895 and of Il vecchio della montagna in 1900, plus the collaboration with magazines La Sardegna, Piccola rivista and Nuova Antologia, her work began to gain critical interest.

In 1903 she published Elias Portolu that confirmed her as a writer and started her work as a successful writer of novels and theatrical works: Cenere (1904), L'edera (1908), Sino al confine (1911), Colombo e sparvieri (1912), Canne al vento (1913), L'incendio nell'oliveto (1918), Il Dio dei venti (1922).

Cenere was the inspiration for a movie with the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

She died in Rome at the age of 64.

Her work has been highly regarded by Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga plus some younger writers such as Enrico Thovez, Pietro Pancrazi and Renato Serra.

Work

Deledda's whole work is based on strong facts of love, pain and death upon which rests the feeling of sin and of an inevitable fatality.

In her works we can recognize the influence of the verism of Giovanni Verga and, sometimes, also that of the decadentism by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

In Deledda's novels there is always a strong connection between places and people, feelings and environment. The environment depicted is that one harsh of native Sardinia, but it is not depicted according to regional veristic schemes neither according to the otherworldly vision by D'Annunzio, but relived through the myth.

Main works

With her husband and son, Rome circa 1905

• Fior di Sardegna (1892)
• La via del male (1896)
• Racconti sardi (1895)
• Anime oneste (1895)
• Dopo il divorzio (1902; English translation: After the Divorce, 1905)
• Elias Portolu (1903)
• Cenere (1904; English translation: Ashes, 1908)
• Nostalgie (1905)
• L'edera (1908)
• Canne al vento (1913)
• Marianna Sirca (1915)
• La madre (1920; English translation: The Woman and the Priest, 1922)
• La fuga in Egitto (1925)
• Il sigillo d'amore (1926)
• Cosima (1937) published posthumously
• Il cedro del Libano (1939) published posthumously

See also

• List of female Nobel laureates

Voice Recording

The voice of the author speaking (in Italian) at the Nobel Prize Ceremony in 1926.

External links

• Works by Grazia Deledda at Project Gutenberg
• Works on the Web
• Nobel Prize autobiography
• Summary of works by Grazia Deledda and complete texts
• Martha King's English translation of Cosima.
• Martha King's English translation of Canne al vento as Reeds in the Wind.

Persondata
Name	Deledda, Grazia
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 27, 1871
Place of birth	Nuoro, Italy
Date of death	August 15, 1936
Place of death	Rome, Italy