Susanna Tamaro

Origins and early life

Susanna Tamaro was born in Trieste on 12 December 1957, and she has said in the Corriere della Sera that her mother's family, the Veneziani, was of Jewish origin; the site records her on the strength of that public statement about her maternal line, and this fiche says plainly that the sources do not name the individual Jewish grandparent, so the case rests on her own declaration rather than on a document.

Work and career

She is also a distant relative of the writer Italo Svevo, himself Jewish, through a shared great-grandmother, Dora Veneziani, sister of Svevo's wife Livia, but that link is additional information and not the basis of her entry. Her parents separated when she was a child and she was raised largely by her maternal grandmother in Trieste, a childhood she has described as unhappy and marked by illness. She studied film direction at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and worked in documentary television before publishing fiction.

Her third book, Va dove ti porta il cuore, published in 1994 as a grandmother's long letter to her granddaughter, sold more than sixteen million copies and was translated into over forty languages, becoming one of the best-selling Italian books of the twentieth century and a film by Cristina Comencini. She has written novels, essays and children's books, including Anima Mundi and Il grande albero, and in 2022 she published a memoir describing her diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome. She lives in the countryside of Umbria.