07/18/2026
I love Andrea Camilleri’s novels so much, always checking for translations as they get published in English!
He went completely blind. He kept writing his most famous detective anyway, one dictated word at a time.
Andrea Camilleri was born in 1925 in Porto Empedocle, a Sicilian port town, and spent his twenties training in stage direction in Rome. He worked for decades as a theater and television director, holding a professorship in Film Direction for 20 years, writing scripts and staging plays by Pirandello and Beckett.
He tried novels twice, in 1978 and 1980. Neither one found readers. He simply stopped, for 12 years.
In 1992, at 67, he tried again. In 1994, at 69, he introduced Inspector Salvo Montalbano to the world, an age when most careers are already winding down. The series eventually sold roughly 25 million copies in Italy alone and was translated into about 30 languages, including Chinese.
He wrote every morning before dawn on a typewriter, for three hours, the same ritual for decades. In 2016, at 90 years old, he published his 100th book.
By then, glaucoma had taken his eyesight completely. He could no longer see the pages he'd spent his whole life filling.
"Every so often, I put a hand in a pocket and caressed a colored stone, the tangible sign that one time the grace to catch a glimpse of beauty was granted to me," he wrote, reflecting on the blindness that had taken over his final years.
He didn't stop writing. He started dictating instead, speaking his novels aloud to his longtime assistant, word by word, the same discipline in a completely different body.
Every family with a grandparent who kept doing the thing they loved long after their hands or eyes stopped cooperating knows exactly what that decision costs, and what it means to make it anyway.
"Montalbano represents the average Italian, who has some virtues and some defects, but who essentially goes through life well," Camilleri once said of the character he built almost entirely without ever seeing him on the page again.
He suffered a heart attack in June 2019 and died in Rome the following month, on July 17th, at 93. Italian President Sergio Mattarella said his death "leaves a vacuum in Italian culture."
A year later, in 2020, "Riccardino" was finally published, the last Montalbano case Camilleri had written and sealed away back in 2006, specifically so it could only reach readers after he was gone. He had planned his own ending fourteen years in advance.
His hometown, Porto Empedocle, still officially carries the name Porto Empedocle Vigàta today, permanently fusing the real Sicily he came from with the fictional one he built entirely from memory and voice.
Andrea Camilleri lost the ability to see his own words and kept speaking them into existence anyway. He gave Italy a detective it still watches in reruns, built by a man who, by the end, could no longer read a single page of it himself.
