Dacia Maraini presents Chiara di Assisi: Poverty, Anorexia and Civil Disobedience

February 27, 2014

Maraini’s strengths are dramatic and political, as has been her life. When she was a child, her parents fled fascist Italy for Japan: there they spent three years in a Japanese prison camp. She is a feminist and a political activist, but while both ways of thinking underscore her writing, she is never politically correct. Often her work is spiky with that suppressed fury of women of talent who have had to spend too much time with men and movements of the left. But above all she is a novelist of grand ambition and intense feeling and, always, an enthralling storyteller.

Holman Room, Mary Lyon Hall  5pm

Event Contact: Professor Tommasina Gabriele, Italian Studies & Women’s Studies