Michela  Murgia 

Michela Murgia, writer, activist, dramatist, commentator and literary critic, religion teacher...and the list could go further, counting all other different jobs she chose to carry out in her not long but very intense life….

Michela Murgia was born in Cabras (Oristano) on 3rd June 1972, and she died of cancer in Rome on 10th August 2023. She had a younger and frail brother, whom she was soon asked to look after, a violent father, a feminist mother, but actually not free in her couple’s life, a peaceful family different than the natural one in her uncle’s home. The painful experience of the violence she had suffered whitin the family she had been born, not only led her to nourish a concept of love as respect for the freedom of others (lesson which fortunately she has given us), but also, and above all, prompted her to found her own family life on the principle of queerness, that is the atypicality in relationships, the uselessness of fixed patterns, of consecrated categories such as the blood tie. Michela Murgia’s numerous queer family, to which four sons de animo (“of the soul”) belong, is built only on the will of its members to stay and remain together: “Why does the will have to count less than the blood?” Michela Murgia wondered in her last interview given on 20th of June to the weekly Vanity fair.

As it easy to see from her large and multifaceted production, Michela Murgia always proposes an original interpretation of reality, expressing it through words of surgical precision, of crystal clarity, of rigorous and stringent arguments. She has dared to break, to contaminate, to combine various factors together (love and freedom, Catholicism and feminism, and so on). It is no coincidence that she chose as a symbol of her own nuptial union the hybrid animal par excellence, the frog, creature of water and land, always ready “to jump, therefore to change”, making it clear how queerness in nature is much more authentic than any distinction and clear-cut definition. Her whole life, in fact, has been an exemplification of her openness to novelty, of her willingness towards change and “hybridism”.

"Change is the only possibility for the survival of the vital energy that each of us intimately cultivates."

Michela Murgia, Dare la vita, 2024