Elena Ferrante
The literary community has been interested in Elena Ferrante's real identity since the early 1990s, when the first novel L'amore molesto (1992, A Troubled Love) was published by the person(s) publishing under this name. The international success of the Genius Girlfriend tetralogy, formed by the novels L'amica geniale (2011, Genius girlfriend), Storia del nuovo cognome (2012, The Story of a New Name), Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013, The story of those who are leaving, and those, who remain) and Storia della bambina perduta (2014, The Story of the Lost Girl), prompted an intensified search for her identity. Whoever Elena Ferrante is, she is currently ranked by critics as one of Italy's greatest living authors, and in 2016 Time magazine listed her among the 100 most influential people in the world.
Czech readers have already encountered her narrative mastery, which is not based on narrative experiments, but on the riveting power of her testimony about the most basic human emotional bonds, in her novel Days of Abandonment (2011). Her novels Troubled Love and Days of Abandonment were adapted into films (1995, r. Mario Martone and 2005, r. Roberto Faenza), and now an eight-part TV series based on the Genius Girlfriend tetralogy is being produced by HBO and the Italian RAI.
