Giorgio Bassani (Bologna, 4 March 1916 – Rome, 13 April 2000) was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.

Bassani was born in Bologna into a prosperous Jewish family of Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico (a doctor), brother Paolo, and sister Jenny.

Despite the anti-Semitic race laws which were introduced in 1938, he was able to graduate in 1939, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century writer, journalist, radical and lexicographer Niccolò Tommaseo.

[2] In 1940, his first book, Una città di pianura ("A City of the Plain"), was published under the pseudonym "Giacomo Marchi" in order to evade the race laws.

His first volume of poems, Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi, appeared in 1944; a second, Te lucis ante, followed in 1947.

As an editorial director of Feltrinelli, Bassani was responsible for the posthumous publication in 1958 of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, a novel which had been rejected by Elio Vittorini at Mondadori, and Einaudi.

These works realistically document the Italian Jewish community under Fascism in a style that manifests the difficulties of searching for truth in the meanderings of memory and moral conscience.