Penguin Press wins nine-way auction to Natalia Ginzburg biography by ex-TLS editor Thea Lenarduzzi

Former Times Literary Supplement editor Thea Lenarduzzi’s “dazzling biography” of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg has gone to Allen Lane in a nine-way auction. 

Josephine Greywoode, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Collapsing Houses: Pieces of Natalia Ginzburg from Irene Baldoni at Georgina Capel Associates. US rights were pre-empted by Jonathan Galassi at Farrar Straus Giroux, Italian rights were sold to Mondadori at auction and Spanish rights went to Lumen. 

The publisher added: “Collapsing Houses is the first English language biography of Italian author Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), whose novels and non-fiction writing have inspired the likes of Elena Ferrante, Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy.  

“Lenarduzzi renders Ginzburg in all her complexity, exploring the lacunae in Ginzburg’s own narrative of her life as a writer, editor, mother and wife, and tracing the powerful ways in which her legacy resonates today. Through fresh interviews, research and compelling imaginative skill, Lenarduzzi builds a rich composite portrait of the beloved Italian writer – reminiscent of the multi-perspective experiments of Ginzburg’s own books – one that is refracted through Lenarduzzi’s own ideas and experiences to dazzling effect.” 

Lenarduzzi is the author of Dandelions (Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2023 PEN Ackerley Prize for outstanding memoir and autobiography. She was raised in northern Italy by an Italian father and Liverpudlian mother, and moved to the UK to attend university. For 12 years, Lenarduzzi worked as a commissioning editor at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), where she also hosted the podcast. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, Literary Review, Vogue and LitHub among others. 

Lenarduzzi said: “It’s been wonderful, and fascinating, to see Ginzburg’s star rise in recent years – in anglophone circles in particular she seems almost to have become a part of the canon – but there’s so much more to say about this complicated and challenging writer.  

“She lived the most astonishing highs and bitter lows, played out against a century of cataclysm and slower, more incipient social changes, and overcame the kind of adversity and tragedy most of us don’t see in our nightmares. And she wrote some of the 20th-Century’s finest, most lucid and tightly controlled works of fiction, non-fiction and the in-between, inspired by her experiences as well as those of the people she was close to. I’m thrilled to have found such a welcoming home for Collapsing Houses and look forward to working with a team that clearly understands – and relishes – the need to ’complicate’ Ginzburg and the foundations of biography itself”.

Greywoode said: “I’m absolutely thrilled to publish Thea’s vivid portrait of a writer whose work is so close to my heart. Collapsing Houses is much more than a biography: in Thea’s captivating and original book, Ginzburg’s life story embodies profound truths about our deepest human relationships; about womanhood, grief and courage, about the ties that bind us and the ones that set us free.”