Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo on 23 December 1896 into an old Sicilian noble family, and he held the title of Prince. He lived most of his life in Sicily, reading widely in several languages and travelling when he could. He served in the Italian army in the First World War. For much of his life he was a private, little-known figure, and he did not publish anything while he was young.

In his last years he wrote a single novel, The Leopard, drawing on the history of his own family and the changes that came to Sicily in the nineteenth century. Publishers rejected it during his lifetime, and he died on 23 July 1957, before it appeared. It was published in 1958 and quickly became one of the most admired Italian novels of the century. It is valued for its elegant prose, its irony and its sad, clear view of a vanishing world.