Born in Nuoro, Sardinia, into a middle-class family, Grazia Deledda attended elementary school and then was educated by a private tutor (a guest of one of her relatives) and moved on to study literature on her own. She started writing at a very young age, inspired by the Sardinian peasants and their struggles.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926 "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general."
In Deledda's novels there is always a strong connection between places and people, feelings and environment. The environment depicted is that one harsh of native Sardinia, but it is not depicted according to regional veristic schemes neither according to the otherworldly vision by D'Annunzio, but relived through the myth.