Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include "If This Is a Man" (1947, published as "Survival in Auschwitz" in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and "The Periodic Table" (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.