Silvana Gandolfi

Silvana Gandolfi is the author of world-famous children’s books.

She was born in Trieste into an Italian-Russian family. The granddaughter of an Odessa writer, Silvana was surrounded from early childhood by books and an atmosphere of literary creativity. The authors on whom she grew up were Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Flaubert, Stendhal…

Silvana says that, as long as she can remember, she has always been surrounded by books, and that she inherited her talent from her ancestors. Beginning her career with novels and scripts for radio plays, Silvana Gandolfi became world-famous thanks to her children’s books. In 1996, her work was honored with the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award, and her books have sold more than 150,000 copies in Italy alone.

Speaking about the reasons for her success, Silvana emphasizes: “In my books, signs of modern society are practically absent. I avoid, as far as possible, using teenagers’ language. I try to place my plots in a somewhat distant time in order to speak about the universal world of childhood.”

As the Italian writer and essayist Antonio Faeti notes: “If it is true that ‘to cheat death, you only have to turn into somebody else,’ as Silvana Gandolfi writes in her latest book, then her works will be eternal, because they turn adult readers into astonished children, and children into passionate and happy readers.”