She immediately understood that writing was in her destiny. So, Tea Ranno decided to turn her passion into a real profession, leaving her career as a notary and her studies in law behind her. The author is eager to explain that Gioia Mia is not a sequel, but rather “separate plots with the same characters,” which in her case are mostly female. And indeed women are at the heart of all her novels.
Once again motherhood is at the center of the story set in a Sicilian village that tells of a woman who wants to make it in life with her own forces but this desire for emancipation will create tension with her husband.
“After two years of Covid,” says the writer, “though living in Rome, I felt the need to estrange myself and to return to Sicily with my mind, to get out of the anguish of the pandemic. It’s a beautiful story of intense feelings but I don’t want to reveal too much. In my novel, you can even find ‘l’amurusanza,’ that network of affection, solidarity and kindness, as an aunt of mine called it when I was a child.” It is a feeling that the author had already described in her book from 2018 and that also returns in her latest novel.
Tea Ranno was born in 1963 in Melilli, a town outside Syracuse. Since 1995 she has been living and working in Rome, with her husband and twin daughters. A degree in law, she was a Calvino Award finalist in 2005 with the novel Cenere, published by Edizioni e/o in 2006. Also with Cenere, she was a Berto Award finalist, winning the Chianti Award in 2008.
In 2021 her novel “Terramarina” won the City of Erice Literary Award.
