Dario Fo

Dario Fo was a world renowned Italian playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. Born into a family of artists in Sangiano, Fo was exposed to the theater at a very young age. He started attending plays with his mother and father when he was a very young boy, thus developing a life long love for the theater. When it was time to enter college Fo moved to Milan to study at the Brera Academy, but World War II would soon interrupt his studies. Although he initially fought under the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's fascist army, Fo himself was an anti-fascist and only fought in the army to avoid any kind of suspicion of being against the government. He would eventually desert Mussolini's army, and lived in hiding in the Italian countryside throughout the remainder of the war. After the war Fo began writing plays. His first few plays were produced in Italy in the late 1950s, and by the following decade he had achieved a sort of celebrity status as one of the country's most respected playwrights. Over the next several decades, throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, Fo wrote dozens of plays, which covered such weighty themes as corruption, racism, Italian organized crime and the Catholic Church. Then when the controversial political figure Silvio Berlusconi came to power as Italian Prime Minister in the 1990s, Fo's plays took on more politically charged themes that sought to question the authority of Berlusconi's dictatorial reign. The highest honor of his life came in 1997 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Italian to receive the prize in over 20 years. Fo continued writing plays up until the end of his life, while managing to stay active in a variety of political and social causes that were close to his heart. He died at the age of 90 on October 13, 2016, the same day the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to the American songwriter Bob Dylan.