Add the Gazzetta del Sud as a source
Gabriele Cavallini, with Cuoio, published by Einaudi, is the winner of the XXXIII edition of the Giuseppe Berto Literary Prize, one of the longest-running and most prestigious Italian awards dedicated to first works of fiction.
The verdict was announced in Capo Vaticano, in the Municipality of Ricadi, in the garden of the house that Giuseppe Berto chose as a place to live and write and where some of the most important pages of his work were born. The ceremony was conducted by the journalist and voice of Zapping on Rai Radio1 Giancarlo Loquenzi, as part of the 11th edition of Estate a Casa Berto, the festival dedicated to the cultural legacy of the writer. The jury chaired by the writer and Strega Prize winner Emanuele Trevi decided the winner.
The jury’s motivation: «Leather is a novel of smells, entrails, rubble and stubborn violence. An ancient, irredeemable violence (…). Gabriele Cavallini writes a novel whose language flays the reader like the machines that treat the skin. He leads us into that factory of pain, among the calves that cry out their anguish, among the remains of flesh that plague the air and the soul, as in a story by Coetzee. But this is not an essay on the hidden price of luxury, of fine clothes. Cavallini does not write to point out our faults but, by telling the story of a family cursed by the habit of death, he wanders into the abysses of the human. In a real and symbolic space that recalls a story by Kafka, “In the penal colony”, where evil, since it is ineradicable, can only be engraved on the skin”.
With Cuoio, Gabriele Cavallini thus enters the roll of honor of an Award created in 1988 on the initiative of Cesare De Michelis, with the aim of keeping the name and work of Giuseppe Berto alive through one of the beliefs that most characterized the writer: the need to offer attention and space to new voices in fiction.
A vocation that the Prize continues to cultivate almost forty years after its birth, intercepting authors at the beginning of their literary journey and contributing, over the years, to bringing to the attention of critics and the public some of the most significant names in contemporary Italian fiction.
The ceremony returned to Calabria this year, according to the traditional alternation with Mogliano Veneto, Berto’s hometown and the place where the Award was founded. Two geographically distant territories but united by the figure of the writer: the original Veneto and Capo Vaticano, where Berto chose to live for a long time and where he still rests today. Also present at the ceremony as godmother was Antonia Berto, the writer’s daughter.
The winner was awarded a cash prize of 5,000 euros, while a further 2,000 euros were divided among the other four finalists: Nikolaj Gory, with The Chair Stuffer (Meltemi); Giulio Silvano, with They won them (Frassinelli); Beatrice Pera, with Bagliori (Einaudi); and Marina Zucchelli, with Latte (Rizzoli).
The Giuseppe Berto Literary Prize is promoted by the Giuseppe Berto Cultural Association and created in collaboration with the Municipality of Mogliano Veneto and the Municipality of Ricadi, in the sign of the link between the places that marked the life and work of the writer.