Literary Birthday – 29 September – Donna Leon
Happy Birthday, Donna Leon, born on 29 September 1942.
Donna Leon Quotes
- I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn’t have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.
- So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can’t read that.
- I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don’t know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it’s in because there are 14 of them now.
- Italians know about human nature – they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.
- The character I created, ‘Commissario Brunetti,’ who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic, and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I’d like to have dinner with.
Donna Leon is the American author. Before she wrote novels, she worked as a travel guide in Rome and as a copywriter in London. She taught literature in universities in Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia. Leon is author of the much-loved, bestselling series of novels featuring Commissario Brunetti and one of The Times’ 50 Greatest Crime Writers. She lived in Italy for many years, and although she now lives in Switzerland, she often visits Venice. She won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction for Friends in High Places
Source for image: Michiel Hendryckx, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donna_Leon.jpg
by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar