Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Donatella Di Pietrantonio is an Italian novelist and pediatric dentist born in 1963 in Arsita, a small village in Abruzzo. She works as a dentist in Penne and has published all her novels while maintaining her medical practice. Her fiction is rooted in the landscapes and communities of Abruzzo, and she is one of the most respected voices in contemporary Italian regional literature. Di Pietrantonio published her debut novel Mia madre è un fiume (My Mother is a River) in 2011. Her breakthrough came with L'arminuta (2017), a short, powerful novel about a girl who is given back to her birth family after years of living as the child of another family. L'arminuta won the Premio Campiello and was translated into English by Ann Goldstein. L'età fragile (The Fragile Age / A Girl Returned), her 2024 Premio Strega winner, returns to the themes of female vulnerability and the violence that shadows women's lives in a story set in the Abruzzo mountains. The novel follows a mother who attempts to protect her daughter from the legacy of a traumatic event, weaving past and present together with great narrative skill. Di Pietrantonio is one of Italy's most beloved contemporary novelists, known for the emotional depth of her fiction and the precision with which she renders the lives of women in a specific, deeply known landscape.