Primo Levi

Primo Levi was an Italian chemist and writer, born in Turin on 31 July 1919 and died there on 11 April 1987. Trained in chemistry, he joined a small partisan group in the Italian mountains in 1943 and was soon captured. As a Jew, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he survived nearly a year, partly because his chemical training proved useful. After the war he returned to Turin and worked for many years as an industrial chemist while writing in his spare time.

His first book, an account of his imprisonment, became one of the central testimonies of the Holocaust. He went on to write further memoirs, stories, essays, poems and a novel, often bringing a scientist's clarity and curiosity to questions of memory, work, cruelty and human dignity. His calm, precise style and his refusal to hate without understanding keep him widely read today.