Italian journalist Claudio Gatti
has "outed" the mysterious bestselling novelist writing under
the pseudonym Elena Ferrante, identifying her based on real
estate and financial records as a literary translator who is
married to novelist Domenico Starnone.
Gatti, an investigative journalist for Italian business
daily Il Sole 24 Ore, reported that records show a dramatic
increase in payments from Ferrante's publishing house in Rome,
Edizioni E/O, to literary translator Anita Raja since 2014.
His article documenting Raja's and Starnone's rising
wealth was published in Il Sole 24 Ore, The New York Review of
Books, Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and French
investigative news site Mediapart on Sunday.
Ferrante became an international phenomenon with her four
novels set in Naples: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a
New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and
The Story of the Lost Child (2015).
The quartet explores the complexities of female friendship
as it interweaves the tales of two women from their poverty and
crime-stricken Naples childhood into adulthood against the
backdrop of Italian postwar history.
Ferrante has kept her real identity a secret since her
first novel, Troubling Love (L'Amore Molesto), was published in
1992. Italian director Mario Martone made a film based on the
novel, which competed at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
Times magazine put her on its list of 100 Most Influential
People in April 2016.
Meanwhile in New York on Monday, shooting began on Ferrante
Fever, a documentary by Italian director Giacomo Durzi to be
filmed on location in Florence, Naples, San Francisco, and
Turin.
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