Elena Ferrante

Ferrante has published under a pseudonym since her 1992 debut, Troubling Love, and has never confirmed her identity despite a 2016 investigation by an Italian journalist that claimed to have unmasked her through financial records, a claim she has neither confirmed nor engaged with. She gives interviews only in writing, collected in the book Frantumaglia, arguing that a book, once finished, belongs to its readers and doesn't need its author's face attached.

The Days of Abandonment (2002), a claustrophobic account of a marriage's collapse, built her reputation before the four Neapolitan Novels, beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2011), turned her into a genuinely global phenomenon, translated into dozens of languages and adapted for television. She continues to write and publish without ever appearing in public.