(1930- )
Italian novelist and journalist, best known for her skills as an uncompromising political interviewer. Her style has been referred to as both controversial and abrasive.
Oriana Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy, on June 29, 1930. Her father, Edoardo, was a member of a liberal underground movement that opposed Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. He was jailed and tortured during the Nazi occupation of Florence but was later released. Following her father’s example, Oriana became a member of the Corps of Volunteers for Freedom, actively fighting the Nazis by the time she was ten. At age sixteen, Oriana made the decision to become a writer. Her writing, both as novelist and journalist, reflects the social and political atmosphere in Italy before her birth and during her childhood.
Oriana’s professional career began when she was hired to write a crime column in an Italian daily paper. She quickly became one of the country’s first successful female journalists, developing an interviewing style that is uniquely her own, boldly asking aggressive questions, highlighting the abuse of power by officials, and writing with subjectivity. She has interviewed such political notables as Henry Kissinger, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Indira Gandhi, Yasser Arafat, the Shah of Iran, Golda Meir, Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi, and Deng Xiaoping.
Fallaci, who said, "I am obsessed by the use-lessness and the stupidity and the cruelty and the folly of the war" (Bibliography Resource Center n.d.), wrote Nothing, and So Be It on the Vietnam War and the novel Inshallah, which deals with Italian troops in Lebanon after U.S. and French troops had becomes targets of suicide truck bombs.
