Elena Ferrante, the elusive Italian writer with a string of successful novels, was outed as Rome-based translator Anita Raja in a New York Review of Books column by investigative journalist Claudio Gatti.
Gatti wrote that he spent months tracking down the true identity of the writer, saying that he was curing speculation around the writer's identity since she had never been photographed and little public information had been given out about her.
Ferrante is arguably one of the best known authors in Italy, selling more than 2 million books worldwide, the BBC News reported. Ferrante's debut novel "Troubling Love" was published in 1991, but her Neapolitan series of four books made her a household name.
Her fourth novel in the Neapolitan series, "The Story of the Lost Child," was nominated for the Man Booker Prize earlier this year.
Gatti called her an "oddly public figure," who had given a family background outline in "Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey,'" which will be published in the United States on Nov. 1.
"But after a months-long investigation it is now possible to make a powerful case for Ferrante's true identity," Gatti wrote. "Far from the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress described in 'Frantumaglia,' new revelations from real estate and financial records point to Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later married a Neapolitan magistrate.
"Raja, who is married to the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone, is known to have had a relationship with Ferrante's publishing house for many years as a translator of German literature. For a brief period she was also the coordinator of 'Collana degli Azzurri," a short-lived imprint of Italian writers at Edizione E/O that, according to a spokesperson for the publisher, released a total of 'three or four books, including Ferrante's first novel,' in the 1990s," Gatti continued.
Gatti wrote that Ferrante's fame made the search for her true identity inevitable. Solving the mystery behind who was really Elena Ferrante landed with a thud for others.
"An appalling, pompous private investigator claims to have found her through examining the financial and real estate records of a translator who lives in Rome," wrote Suzanne Moore, a writer with The Guardian. "This literary doxing by this self-appointed arbiter of 'truth' is a nasty violation. Claudio Gatti has no right to unmask this author."
Others writers and fans shared similar sentiments on social media.
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