Alba de Céspedes (1911–1997)

Alba de Céspedes was born in Rome, Italy, to an Italian mother and an aristocratic Cuban father She grew up in a wealthy and politically engaged family (her grandfather was the first president of Cuba), and became fluent in both Spanish and Italian, as well as several other European languages. She became a writer at a young age and published her first collection of short stories, L'anima degli altri (The Soul of Others) at 24, in 1935. She was jailed for anti-fascist activities in 1935 and 1943. Her first novel, Nessuno torna indietro (There's No Turning Back), which appeared in 1938, was banned by the Italian fascist regime but became a bestseller internationally. During World War II, de Céspedes worked with the Italian Resistance and made broadcasts with Radio Partigiana in Bari under the pseudonym Clorinda.
At the end of the war, she founded the literary magazine Mercurio, which published many authors who greatly influenced cultural developments in Italy and worldwide. After it closed, from 1952 to 1958, she wrote a regular column for the weekly magazine Epoca, as well as contributing to newspapers such as La Stampa. Her best known work today may be the feminist novel Quaderno proibito (Forbidden Notebook, also known as The Secret), published in 1952. In the late 1950s, she moved to Paris and wrote her last novels and poems in French. She worked in theater and films, and several of her books were made into movies and television dramas. De Céspedes was married twice: firstly in 1926, at age of 15, to count Giuseppe Antamoro, with whom she had a son; they divorced in 1931. In 1940 she married the Italian diplomat Franco Bounous and accompanied him to the USA and the USSR.