“Vittorini” Award, the best first work is by Anna Mallamo

Erica Donzella with “Do not offend” (Kalòs), Rosa Matteucci with “Cartagloria” (Adelphi) and Nadeesha Uyangoda with “Dirty water” (Einaudi) are the three finalist writers of the Elio Vittorini national literary prize.

The 25th edition, which also marks the 60th anniversary of the death of the Syracuse writer (a special philatelic postmark and a philatelic exhibition of the Sicilian Collectors Union dedicated to twentieth-century Sicilian authors) will be held entirely by women.

Anna Mallamo wins the First Film Award

The commission, chaired by professor Antonio Di Grado, declared the winner for the First Work section Anna Mallamo, author of the book “I can see it in the dark” (Einaudi). Mallamo, a journalist for the Gazzetta del Sud, from Stresse – as she likes to define herself as she is originally from Reggio Calabria – has already won great acclaim and numerous awards with her first book, set in her city of origin in the early 1980s.

«From the very first lines – we read in the jury’s motivation – Anna Mallamo enters the heart of an evocative language, corroborating the grip on reality in dialect, and distilling idioms, phrases and adverbs to pierce the veil of thoughts, and penetrate the silences, the reticence, the omissions of her characters. “As long as we ‘mazzuno intr’a iddi”, we are safe, think many of the protagonists of his novel, built on the border between criminals and good Christians, to the point of unpredictably confusing it. The same detachment touches Reggio Calabria, a city that has lost its splendor, to slip on the fault of the Strait, clinging to the ancient ruins, the Greek walls, the rubble of the earthquake, the houses of the dead. No indulgence in lyricism, but a hard look that ends up making us love it as the substratum of a thousand-year-old civilization that resists, despite progress, the inhumanity of the many who oppose the few with mockery and apathy.”

The recognition in Rubbettino and the final in Syracuse

The Arnaldo Lombardi Award for independent publishing, dedicated to the memory of one of the “fathers” of the Vittorini Award, went instead to the Rubbettino publishing house which, starting in 1972 from the historic first nucleus of Soveria Mannelli, in the province of Catanzaro, has grown to present itself today as a large network capable of uniting intellectuals, academics and otherwise, research centers and cultural policy players with the aim of providing its readers with a glimpse of reality in a perspective free from any conditioning ideological.

The final ceremony will take place on Saturday 12 September at the Antico Mercato of Ortigia at the conclusion of the Victorian Week which, starting from Wednesday 9, will see numerous events take place at the Urban Center of Syracuse. To designate, among the three finalists, the winner of the XXV Vittorini Prize, the Readers’ Jury comes into play – made up of readers recommended by the public libraries of Syracuse, the city’s bookshops and the Dante Alighieri Society – which will express a vote that will be added to the individual vote of each member of the commission.

The Elio Vittorini National Literary Prize and the VII Arnaldo Lombardi Prize for independent publishing are promoted by the Vittorini-Quasimodo cultural association and by the Department of Culture of the City of Syracuse in collaboration with the Inda Foundation and with the patronage of the Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity of the Region.