Donna Leon

Writer and teacher. At the age of twenty-three, she left her hometown to become a writer and teacher in Italy. Since then, she has worked as a tour guide in Rome, copywriter in London and a teacher in Switzerland, Iran, China and Saudi Arabia. She has lived and worked in Venice since 1981.

She is famous for her novels featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti, the central protagonist of all her books and whom Donna Leon thought up at the beginning of the 90s while attending a rehearsal for an opera at the Fenice. The result was Death at La Fenice (1992), which won the prestigious Suntory Award for best crime novel and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Since then, the melancholic Police Brunetti has appeared in seventeen more books.

Next to music, her grand passion is ecology, a subject that she mentions in books like Glass poison (2006), which deals with the environmental destruction of the island of Murano.

http://www.groveatlantic.com/grove/leon/leon.htm
http://www.donnaleon.co.uk/