Lattes Grinzane 2021 Award, Nicola Lagioia wins

Nicola Lagioia with “The city of the living” (Einaudi) is the winner of the eleventh edition of the Lattes Grinzane Award, an international recognition named after Mario Lattes, which brings together Italian and foreign authors and is dedicated to the best fiction books published in the last year. His victory was proclaimed by the votes of 400 students and students of the twenty-five high school juries (twenty-four in Italy and one in Madrid). The award ceremony for Nicola Lagioia, director of the Turin International Book Fair, was held this afternoon at the Busca Social Theater in Alba (Cuneo). The other four finalists in the competition were: Kader Abdolah (born in Iran and political refugee in Holland) with “The path of the yellow slippers” (Iperborea; translation by Elisabetta Svaluto Moreolo), Bernardine Evaristo (British of Nigerian origin) with “Girl, woman, other “(Sur; translation by Martina Testa), Maylis de Kerangal (French) with” A world at hand “(Feltrinelli; translation by Maria Baiocchi), Richard Russo (American) with” The consequences “(Neri Pozza ; translation by Ada Arduini) .Margaret Atwood (Canada), published in Italy mainly by Ponte alle Grazie, received the Lattes Grinzane 2021 Special Prize, awarded each year to an internationally renowned author or author recognized worldwide, who in over time has garnered a shared appreciation of critics and readers. In front of the theater audience he proposed a lectio magistralis on writing and storytelling, entitled “Telling stories”. Author of successful novels such as “The Handmaid’s Tale”, “The Testaments”, “The Other Grace” and “The Year Before the Deluge”, many of which have been transposed into television series, Atwood has recently published in Italy the collection of poems “Moltissimo” (Ponte alle Grazie) and “Tric Trac Trio” (Salani) for younger readers. This is the motivation of the technical jury on the novel by Nicola Lagioia: “The author reconstructs a real event, with extreme and disturbing: the grim murder of a young man by two boys from a good family. to the trials and suicide of one of the perpetrators, it overlaps with the life of the one who narrates and tries to understand, his most immediate reactions in the days of the event, his meetings with the investigators and with many people in various relationships with them protagonists tto is perceived within the lacerations of Rome, in the poison of decay and death that possesses it, beyond which however a vital force resists, something that imposes itself and captures itself beyond all limits. By immersing himself in the pulsating breath of Rome, the narrator brings to light many resistant glimmers of humanity; he questions with restrained delicacy, without moralism but also without indulgence, the reasons of each one, far from any indiscretion and any complacency for excess. From the reasons of an evil that seems to have congealed in things, in the disintegration of civil and social spaces, it seems almost to extract a hope of humanity and redemption “. This year, special moments in the Piedmontese capital with some authors of the Lattes Grinzane Prize, as a preview of the Turin International Book Fair: Margaret Atwood, Kader Abdolah and Maylis de Kerangal will hold individual meetings open to the public on Sunday 3 October in Turin, organized by the Turin International Book Fair (Centro Lingotto Congresses, from 3.30 pm).