Michela Murgia, the Italian writer and civil rights campaigner, has died at the age of 51.
Murgia, who was born in Cabras, Sardinia, and was known for her campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights and euthanasia, publicly revealed (in Italian) a few months ago that she had been diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer. The award-winning writer and intellectual decided to speak openly about her illness, continuing to write articles and speak at public debates.
“I’m having the time of my life now, so no one can do anything to me any more,” she said, during one of her last meetings with readers (Italian). “I wake up in the morning and say, enough is enough, I say everything, I do everything. What are they doing to me? Will they fire me? I wanted to get dressed at ten in the morning, in an evening gown, like queens do, and I did. But you don’t want to wait until you have cancer to feel so free.”
In July she announced she had married (Italian) the actor and director Lorenzo Terenzi, in the company of close friends whom she called her “queer family”.
The news of her death on Thursday was met by hundreds of messages of condolence from writers, politicians, artists and intellectuals.
“We will always fight together, because you will always be there and we will win,” said Alessandro Zan, a gay politician with the centre-left Democratic party (PD), who drafted a law that would have criminalised homophobia, to which the Vatican and far-right parties were opposed.
In 2022, she wrote God Save the Queer, an essay in which she reflected on the possibility of being a feminist and a Christian. “I would like to understand, as a feminist, if the Christian faith is really in contradiction with our desire for an inclusive and non-patriarchal world, or if instead it can’t even show itself as an ally. As a Christian, I trust that faith also needs a feminist and queer perspective,” she wrote.
The National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) recalled the writer with a post on Twitter (Italian): “Bella, ciao”, quoting an Italian anti-fascist song.
In 2018 Murgia wrote a satirical manual entitled How to Become a Fascist in which she tried to explain the rise of right-wing extremism.
Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, also expressed her condolences.
“She was a woman who fought to defend her ideas and although they were notoriously different from mine, I have great respect for this,” wrote Meloni (Italian).
Murgia, who won the Premio Campiello literary prize in 2010, had called the current Italian administration “a fascist government” and said: “I hope to die when Meloni is no longer prime minister.”
Murgia was a playwright, essayist and columnist, and had worked as a religion teacher and as director of a power plant. She made her literary debut in 2006 with the novel Il Mondo Deve Sapere (The World Must Know), a satire about exploitation in a telemarketing call centre that was made into a play of the same name and adapted to become the 2008 film Tutta la Vita Davanti (Whole Life Ahead), by Paolo Virzì.
Her most well-known book, Accabadora (2009), about euthanasia and adoption, earned her many awards.
The writer and intellectual Roberto Saviano, a friend of Murgia and a civil-rights ally, remembered the writer (Italian) with the title of the 1913 Italian silent film Ma L’amor Mio Non Muore (Love Everlasting), released in 1913, beside a photo of her smiling.
