Pia Pera (12 March 1956 – 26 July 2016) was an Italian novelist, essayist, and translator. Born in

Lucca Lucca ( , ) is a city and ''comune'' in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the Serchio River, in a fertile plain near the Ligurian Sea. The city has a population of about 89,000, while its province has a population of 383,957. Lucca is known as ...

, the daughter of the jurist Giuseppe, a noted translator of Pushkin into Italian Pera started her own writing career in 1992, with the short stories collection ''La bellezza dell'asino'' ("''The Beauty of the Donkey''"). She got international notoriety with her 1995 novel '' Lo's Diary'' ( it, Diario di Lo), a retelling of

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...

's novel ''

Lolita ''Lolita'' is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Hum ...

'' from the point of view of the female title character. In later years she specialized in novels connected to her passion for gardening. Pera was also a translator of

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

novels and an essayist. She was a professor of

Russian literature Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Ag ...

at the

University of Trento The University of Trento (Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Trento'') is an Italian university located in Trento and nearby Rovereto. It has been able to achieve considerable results in didactics, research, and international relations accord ...

. Her last work was the semi-autobiographic novel ''Al giardino ancora non l’ho detto'' ("I haven't told my garden yet"). Pera died at 60 years old of

motor neuron disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurodegenerative disease that results in the progressive loss of motor neurons that control voluntary muscles. ALS is the most comm ...

References

1956 births 2016 deaths Writers from Lucca 20th-century Italian novelists 21st-century Italian novelists 20th-century Italian translators Italian women novelists Italian women essayists Italian essayists Academic staff of the University of Trento 20th-century essayists 21st-century essayists 20th-century Italian women writers 21st-century Italian women writers Neurological disease deaths in Tuscany Deaths from motor neuron disease {{Italy-writer-stub