Donna Leon’s 33 crime novels have sold 7.6 million copies in English. They have also been translated into 35 other languages. She is an American now living in Switzerland, but she spent 30 years living in Italy. Yet she has never allowed her books to be translated into Italian. “I don’t want trouble,” Leon, 80, explains. “I’m really a coward. I will do anything to avoid confrontation. I’ll lie. I’ll cheat. I’ll run away. I just can’t stand a situation in which people raise their voices and display animosity.”
Italians assume that, because she writes about murders in Venice, her books are anti-Italian. “Two elderly women I knew came to me and said, why do you write those things against Italy? But they couldn’t come
