Tamaro Susanna

Susanna Tamaro, born in Trieste in 1957, began her career studying directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. After working as an assistant and shooting documentaries, she wrote her first novel, Illmitz, in 1981, published only many years later, in 2014. Despite numerous initial publishing rejections, she managed to publish La testa fra le nuvole in 1989, winning the Elsa Morante Opera Prima award. In the same year, she moved to Umbria.
The collection of short stories Per voce sola (1991) won her critical acclaim. Her big worldwide success came in 1994 with Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, which sold fourteen million copies worldwide and was adapted for the cinema. This book became the biggest Italian publishing success of the century.
Other notable works include the novel Anima mundi (1997) and Ascolta la mia voce (2007), considered a continuation or the other part of Va’ dove ti porta il cuore. In 2013 he published Ogni angelo è tremendo, an exploration of his difficult childhood and literary vocation, and a Via Crucis: Meditations on the Passion.
In 2016 he won the first edition of the Premio Strega for children (+6) with Salta Bart! A significant work of the following years is Il tuo sguardo illumina il mondo (2018), in which he addresses, among other themes, the late discovery that he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome.
More recent works include a reflection on the pandemic years Torn Human (2022), the start of a new trilogy for children with We All Have a Star (2023), and the novel The Wind Blows Where It Wills (October 2023). She also starred in the documentary Inedita (2021).
Susanna Tamaro lives in the countryside in Orvieto, devoting herself to writing, animals and her farm. She founded the Tamaro Foundation in 2000 to support humanitarian projects, funding it with proceeds from her books.