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WHEN 77-year-old Italian journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci died last week in Florence, it was adieu to "Italy’s most celebrated female writer," as she had been called by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. She lived in New York, and had returned secretly to her native city before her death. Fallaci had been sick with cancer for several years. She had been described in The Los Angeles Times as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no." Fallaci got several prizes both for her journalistic work and for her books. Her writings have been translated in 21 different languages. Last November she received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York for her "heroism and valour" that made of her "a symbol of struggle against oppression and fascism." Fallaci’s long journalistic career started shortly after having fought fascism as a partisan together with her whole family when she was a teenager. The respect she soon acquired in the Italian press, had her collaborate with Corriere della Sera as war correspondent, first in Vietnam, then in Pakistan, South America and Middle East. She interviewed international leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Omar Khadafi, the Shah of Iran, Deng Xiaoping, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis. She published her first book, The seven sins of Holliwood in 1956. Her Inshallah, more than 600 pages about her direct experience of the Arab world, was completed in 1990. After 11 years of silence, Fallaci caused an international uproar with her book The Rage and The Pride, which is a slightly modified version of a long article she published in Corriere della Sera as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11. In this publication, as well as in the subsequent The Force of Reason, Interviewing myself and Apocalypse, Fallaci compares several governments of the Arab world to Nazism, and claims that Europe needs to acknowledge that Islam is trying to colonise the Western countries and erase their values, without any intention or possibility of true integration.
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