With a cinema degree attained in 1976 in Rome, Tamaro started filming some science documentaries for television. In 1989, she published her first novel, La testa fra le nuvole, inspired by childhood and adolescence, and she won a First Book Elsa Morante prize. Her literary vocation got to a peak with the short stories collection Per voce sola (1991) and legitimized with the national best-seller Follow Your Heart (1994), that sold more than 15 million copies and got adapted into a movie by Cristina Comencini in 1995. In 1997 the novels Anima mundi and Cara Mathilda came out. 2002 was the year of Più fuoco, più vento, followed in 2003 by the short story collection Fuori. After Ogni parola è un seme (2005), in 2007 Ascolta la mia voce was conceived as an ideal sequel of Follow Your Hearth. Then Luisito (2008), Il grande albero (2009), Per sempre (2011), the essay collection L'isola che c'è (2011), Ogni angelo è tremendo (2013), her never published before novel Illimitz (2014), Un cuore pensante (2015) and La tigre e l'acrobata (2016) came out. Tamaro also wrote some children books as Salta, Bart! (2014), that won the first edition of the Strega Prize for kids literature in 2016. She lives far from mundanity in Orvieto countryside. In her last book, titled Il tuo sgurado illumina il mondo (2018) she revealed to suffer from Asperger syndrome.