CALNE-based author Dee La Vardera is hoping her account of a wartime atrocity in Italy will touch the hearts of the judges, after the book has been shortlisted for an award at a forthcoming literary festival.

On June 29, 1944, just over 75 years ago, the German Hermann Goring Division murdered 244 people in retaliation for partisans killing two German soldiers in Italy. Mrs La Vardera came across the tale while researching her book The Road to Civitella 1944: the Captain, the Chaplain and the Massacre, which was publishjed in 2016.

Now the work has been shortlisted for the Hall & Woodhouse DLF Local Writing Prize at the Dorchester Literary Festival this autumn.

Mrs La Vardera said: “I am thrilled to be shortlisted and to have my book recognised in this way.

“It’s wonderful discovering hidden stories and being able to explore the subjects and present them to readers.

“I felt it important to write about the unspoken heroism and empathy of these two officers - good men doing good deeds in the most difficult of circumstances.

“It was such a moving story it had to be told.”

The book tells the true story of two British officers who visited Civitella after the retreat of the German forces and helped the community to put their lives back together after the massacre.

Captain John Percival Morgan and Father Clement O'Shea, of the Eighth Army in Italy, came across the hilltop village in Tuscany.

They were moved by the plight of the small community and over a five-month period regularly brought life-saving supplies and comfort to the women and children.

The village organised a farewell Christmas party that survivors still remember today, treasuring gifts they received from their 'Santa in a truck'.

Without the work of Keith Morgan, Captain Morgan's son, who came across Civitella in 1997, while retracing his father's wartime journey, this part of Civitella's history would have gone unrecorded and forgotten. In 2001 the village commemorated the work of this father and friends by naming a street Costa Capitano John Percival Morgan.

Mrs La Vardera’s Italian husband Alfred helped with some of the translation of documents from Italy so she could use authentic material to write her account.

The former English teacher is a member of the Society of Authors and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists (SWWJ), who has written a series of local history books and co-wrote Survivor of the Long March, Five Years as a POW, 1940-1945 with Charles Waite, in 2012.