Oriana Fallaci

H Oriana Fallaci was born in Florence in 1929. Her father was a liberal who actively participated in the resistance against fascism and Nazism. She began her career at a young age in journalism. Despite the fact that the Dean of Columbia University, when awarding her an honorary degree in Literature, emphasized that Fallaci is among the most popular and beloved writers in the world, she became more widely known as a journalist for her groundbreaking interviews with personalities and leaders such as Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and others. As a war correspondent, she covered most of the major armed conflicts of our time: from Vietnam to the Middle East, from the uprising in Hungary in 1956 to the revolts in Latin America in the 1970s, from the 1968 massacre in Mexico, where she was seriously injured, to the Gulf War. In 1973, she interviewed Alekos Panagoulis just two days after his release from the junta's prisons, which led to a whirlwind romance between them. After Panagoulis's death in 1976, she began writing the book "A Man," which was published in 1979 and caused a sensation worldwide. Her successful books also include "Niente e così sia" ("Nothing, and So Be It"), about the Vietnam War, 1969, "Letter to a Child Never Born," 1975, "Inshallah," a novel set in Lebanon shortly after the 1980 war, 1992, "The Rage and the Pride," essays, 2001, "La forza della ragione" ("The Force of Reason"), 2005, which have been translated and published in more than 30 countries. She was honored with the Saint-Vincent, Bancarella, Viareggio, and Antibes awards. In recent years, her views on the Islamic world and Islamists, which she publicized, as always, provocatively and without reservations, elicited mixed reactions. She passed away at the age of 77 on September 15, 2006, in Florence.