Giuseppe Catozzella with “The flower of the illusions” (Feltrinelli, October 2024) is the winner of the XXIV edition of the national literary prize “Elio Vittorini”. The story of the relationship between two cousins, between two Italie, chasing a dream, convinced the commission, chaired by Professor Antonio di Grado – which includes teachers, academics, essayists and literary critics – and the strong readers committee, compared to the other two finalists Wanda Marasco with “From behind to this world” (Neri Pozza, January 2025), and Elisabetta Rasy with ” (Rizzoli, January 2025).
Last night at the ancient market of Ortigia the delivery of the literary prize to Catozzella which describes a protagonist divided by a south where there is freedom, and the north is the place where he discovers love, “where he gives the deal with a father for whom dreams are only illusions. The place where he begins to believe he can truly realize his dream, which is the key, perhaps, with which to recompose the fracture of the two worlds that leads inside ». And in the motivation the jury recalls that: “The exercise of writing, of the telling, for the protagonist of” The flower of the illusions “becomes a reason for emancipation from a subordinate condition of a poor and backward south to a rich and developed North, a transfer that does not simply mean the abandonment of an environment and a costume”.
During the evening, conducted by Mimmo Contestabile, the Prize for the Section was also awarded “Opera first” To Roberta Casasole, author of the book “Type 1 women” (Feltrinelli, July 2024). Space also to the special mention for Emma di Rao author of “Poisons and perfumes” (Ianieri, December 2024).
Also awarded the premium for independent publishing Arnaldo Lombardi, who went to the Kalòs publishing house in Palermo who since 1989 tells, through the titles of his varied catalog, all the beauty of Sicily with a precise mission: to spread the beauty of the territory and inspire readers to know and preserve it. To the president of the Cultural Association Vittorini-Qualismo, Enzo Papa, the task of remembering, on the centenary of the birth, the presence in Syracuse in 1996 by Andrea Camilleri with the “Brewer of Preston”: work that won Vittorini but not the Superpremio dei readers.
