GRAZIA DELEDDA was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had a limited formal education, but was an avid reader. She published her first story in 1886 when she was fifteen, in a newspaper in Nuoro. Her stories continued to be published in one of the many fashion magazines of the late nineteenth century, Ultima Moda.
Although the dismay of her family and friends distressed her, it also strengthened her resolve to succeed. In 1899 she left Nuoro and went to Cagliari, where she met and married Palmiro Madesani. A year later they moved to Rome, where Deledda lived a quiet life with her husband and two sons until her death in 1936, at sixty-five.
Deledda wrote thirty-three novels and many books of short stories. With the major exception of La Danza della Collana (1924, published in 2023 by Italica Press as The Dance of the Necklace), almost all of them are set in Sardinia. Among her better-known novels are L’Edera (1908, published by Italica Press in 2021 as Ivy), Elias Portolu, Canne al vento (1913, published by Italica Press in 1998 as Reeds in the Wind), La madre, Annalena Bilsini, and her posthumous autobiographical novel, Cosima (English translation published by Italica Press in 1988).
Grazia Deledda became, in 1926, the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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