Italian · b. 1943
A Neapolitan schoolteacher who became a journalist, a screenwriter and one of Italy's most respected novelists, winning the Strega Prize in 2001 for Via Gemito, a book about his violent, thwarted painter father. He is married to the translator Anita Raja, whom statistical stylometry and a journalist's investigation of publishing-house payments have both proposed as Elena Ferrante, a claim Starnone treats with visible irritation and has never confirmed or denied. His own novels are short, exact and domestic: a marriage examined from three angles, a grandfather and grandson in an apartment, a Naples that presses on people who have escaped it. Jhumpa Lahiri learned Italian well enough to translate three of them, and her versions have given him an anglophone readership he did not have before.