“Cross the sea,” a young Grazia Deledda wrote in a poem to Americans in 1893, “and tell everyone that the island of Sardinia is still waiting to be discovered and known.” On the 100th anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature, the powerful legacy of Deledda, like a literary apparition, is now waiting for American and the English-reading world to rediscover her works.
Hailed in the American newspapers in 1902 as the “George Sand of Sardinia”—though, George Sand never won the Nobel—Deledda’s role in Sardinian literature occupied its own realm. “Why should anyone feel doubtful about the future of fiction,” the American reviewer noted, “when young authors are rising every day, to show us the world as it appears.”
