Francesca Sanvitale (17 May 1928 – 9 February 2011) was an Italian novelist and journalist, "one of Italy's most renowned contemporary authors".[1]
Born in Milan, Francesca Sanvitale lived in Florence for two decades, gaining a degree there in Italian literature before moving to Rome in 1961.[2] She wrote television plays and contributed to cultural programmes for RAI.[3]
Her first novel was Il cuore borghese (1972). Madre e figlia (1980), a semi-autobiographical novel about an intense relationship between a mother and her illegitimate child, won both the Fregene Prize and the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize.[2] The protagonist in Sanvitale's third novel, L'uomo del parco (1984), attempted to find the truth about herself through psychoanalysis.[3] As well as other novels, Sanvitale collected short stories in La realtà è un dono (1987) and Separazioni (1997). L'inizio è in autunno won the Viareggio Prize in 2008.[4]
She died in Rome.