Italian novelist, essayist, playwright, and translator, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi; 1916-1991) was famous for her portraits of family life and for her spare style.

Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo in 1916, the daughter of Guiseppe Levi, a prominent anatomy professor. She grew up in Turin where she married the translator and anti-Fascist leader Leone Ginzburg. During the early years of World War II she and her family lived in forced residence in the mountainous Abruzzi region. (Her father and two brothers were arrested by the Fascists; one brother escaped.) In 1943 Ginzburg, her husband, and three children moved to Rome where he was soon arrested for editing an underground newspaper and tortured to death by the Nazis. After his death she returned to Turin where she worked as an editor with the famous Einaudi publishing house and wrote. In 1950 she married Gabriele Baldini, a musicologist and professor...