Oriana Fallaci facts for kids

Oriana Fallaci (29 June 1929 - 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A young partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career.

She has interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as the Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Omar Khadafi, Federico Fellini, Sammy Davis Jr, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasser Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis, Archbishop Makarios III, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Haile Selassie and Sean Connery.

After retirement, she returned to writing a series of articles and books critical of Islam and Arabs and for few people the articles were speaking about racism and Islamophobia. Oriana Fallaci hated Mexicans and Muslims, for their ideas and for the role of the Muslim women in Islamic society.

Life and career

Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy. During World War II, she joined the resistance in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà". Her father Edoardo Fallaci, was a famous antifascist political activist, in Florence.

Fallaci began her journalistic career in her teens, becoming a special correspondent for the Italian paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1946. After 1967 she worked as a war correspondent, in Vietnam, for the Indo-Pakistani War, in the Middle East and in South America. For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo and wrote for a number of leading newspapers and Epoca magazine. During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican forces. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months "disgust" her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. "I don't love the Mexicans," Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. "If you hold a gun and say, 'Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,' I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls."

In the late 1970s, she had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who was a big rebel in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship, having been captured, heavily tortured and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt against dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. In 1972 she interviewed Henry Kissinger.

Fallaci has twice received the St. Vincent Prize for journalism, as well as the Bancarella Prize (1971) for Nothing, and So Be It; Viareggio Prize (1979), for Un uomo: Romanzo; and Prix Antibes, 1993, for Inshallah. She received a D.Litt. from Columbia College (Chicago). She has lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Fallaci’s writings have been translated into 21 languages including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Swedish, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian and Slovenian.

Fallaci, smoked always during her life, died on 15 September 2006 where she was born, in Florence, from lung cancer.

Images for kids

Fallaci in Tehran (1979). To interview the Ayatollah Khomeini, she was required to wear a chador. During the interview, she removed it and attacked the obligation of women to wear it.
Cimitero degli Allori, Oriana Fallaci