Francesca Serra was born in Florence and lives in Geneva, where she teaches Italian literature. She has published Calvino e il pulviscolo di Palomar (1996), Casanova autobiografo (2001), Galleria Palazzeschi (2005), Calvino (2006) and she curated Alberto Moravia’s Opere 1927-1940 (2000) and the Racconti dispersi 1928-1951 (2000). In 2011 she wrote the pamphlet Le brave ragazze non leggono romanzi (Good Girls don’t Read Novels), which deals with the female reader considered as the scapegoat of modern culture’s commodification process. In 2013 she published La morte ci fa belle (Death Makes us Beautiful), which put the exquisite corpse of a beautiful lifeless woman at the centre of a ritual killing connected to the masculine yearning for glory and immortality. Her novel La grande Blavatsky (The Great Blavatsky) came out in 2016. This book was inspired by the rocambolesque adventures of the founder of theosophy, Helena Blavatsky: a giantess with Mongolian blood, who fascinated the most brilliant men of her age with her magnetic gaze, drawing them in as if they were mice following the Pied Piper, all the way to her death and beyond.