Born in 1871 in the small, isolated vilage of of Nuoro in Sardinia, Grazia Deledda published her first writings at the age of 17. Growing up in Sardinia made it impossible for her to have an on-going education and so she taught herself, taking time to learn all about the Sardinian culture which was to be the subject in so many of her novels. In 1892 she published her first novel, "Fior di Sardegna" and in 1900 she married and moved to Rome. It was this distance from her home town that had such a positive effect on her writing, she wrote of the region and its people in an almost fairy-tale manner, man and nature forming a single unity. Her most widely-read and most translated book, "Canne al vento", the story of the aristocratic Pintor family living in a run-down house in a primitive world and struggling to adapt to the changing world around them, together with her novel "Cenere", a story of a young mother who sacrifices herself for her illegitimate child, both significantly contributed to her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. Deledda died just ten years later and her autobiographical novel, "Cosima", which deals with the subject of breast cancer, was published posthumously in 1937.