Gianni Rodari

Gianni Rodari (1920 to 1980) was an Italian writer, poet and journalist who began his working life as an elementary schoolteacher and became the country's most celebrated twentieth-century author for children. He received his teacher's diploma at seventeen and taught in rural schools of the Varese district before the Second World War, then turned to journalism and, from 1948, to books for young readers. He edited the children's weekly Il Pioniere from 1950 and published Il romanzo di Cipollino in 1951. Between 1966 and 1969 he worked intensively on collaborative projects with children, and in 1974 he published La grammatica della fantasia, translated into English as The Grammar of Fantasy, an introduction to the art of inventing stories that teachers and writers have used to cultivate children's imagination and language. He held that children's literature should treat serious social issues while exercising a child's imagination and verbal skills. He won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1970 and died in Rome in 1980.