Questions: Entertainment & Arts

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works.

Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.

In October 2016, investigative reporter Claudio Gatti published an article jointly in Il Sole 24 Ore and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that relied on financial records related to real estate transactions and royalties payments to draw the conclusion that Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator, is the real author behind the Ferrante pseudonym.

In December 2016, the controversial Italian prankster Tommaso Debenedetti published on the website of the Spanish daily El Mundo a purported interview with Raja confirming she was Elena Ferrante; this was quickly denied by Ferrante's publisher, who called the interview a fake.

In September 2017, a team of scholars, computer scientists, philologists and linguists at the University of Padua analyzed 150 novels written in Italian by 40 different authors, including seven books by Elena Ferrante, but none by Raja. Based on analysis using several authorship attribution models, they concluded that Anita Raja's husband, author and journalist Domenico Starnone, is the probable author of the Ferrante novels. Raja has worked for E/O Publishing as copy editor and has been editing Starnone's books for years.

Ferrante has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that she is actually a man, telling Vanity Fair in 2015 that questions about her gender are rooted in a presumed "weakness" of female writers.

ARTICLE: Have Italian Scholars Figured Out the Identity of Elena Ferrante?