Fabrizia Ramondino was born in 1936 in Naples, but lived abroad in Spain, France and Germany for many years. In the early 1960s, she returned to Naples where she taught in the schools and devoted herself to volunteer work with children and in clinics.
At the age of 45 she published her first novel and masterpiece, Althénopis (1981), about her childhood in German-occupied Naples. Her other books include her great novel on family, Guerra di infanzia e di Spagna (2001), and L’isola riflessa (1998), about her struggle with depression on the island of Ventotene.
Ramondino also cemented her position in hybrid genres with a considerable non-fiction element. In her book Un giorno e mezzo (1988), she describes her activism in the New Left political groups; Passaggio a Trieste (2000) is about the world of mental health centres.
Ramondino’s extensive travels in Germany resulted in Taccuino tedesco (1987), in which she observed the changes in German society after the fall of the Wall and carried out a critical review of her adherence to communism.
In 2008, she collapsed after a swim in the sea of Gaeta the day before the launch of her last novel La via.