Elena Ferrante

The identity of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, who has published eleven books since 1992, remains unconfirmed despite several popular theories. The first of her four Neapolitan novels, which follow the lives of Lenù and Lila, a pair of friends who grow up together in a Naples slum, appeared in 2011. “If the need to write is strong, you sooner or later find an arrangement that leaves you some room,” she said in a 2018 interview. “But that holds for all the fundamental experiences of life. They hit us, they overwhelm us, and then, if we don’t end up dead in a corner, we write.”