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2019

ANNIE ERNAUX, 2019 XIII EDITION WINNER

**ANNIE ERNAUX, UNA DONNA translated by Lorenzo Flabbi – L’Orma**

Motivation

“A Woman’s Story is a minimalist masterpiece. A few days after her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s in a hospital in the Paris suburbs, Annie Ernaux decides to write about her in the sparest, most honest way imaginable. She portrays her mother in all her wilfulness, self-discipline, violence and tenderness.The mother (never named) works day and night, determined to push her daughter into a life that is superior to her own. This splendid book, among others by Ernaux, is the proof that her mother’s ambitions were fulfilled. But it is not just the story of a poor family in rural Normandy during and after World War II. It is also a picture of an entire generation. As in her subsequent The Years, Ernaux, perhaps under the influence of the philosopher Bourdieu, renders a larger picture of the cultural effects of poverty on an entire population. This is a book anyone can enjoy, for its intimacy, its directness and its touching evocation of a deceased parent.”

2019 XIII EDITION FINALISTS

ANDRÉS BARBA, REPUBBLICA LUMINOSA translated by Pino Cacucci – La nave di Teseo

Novelist, essayist, poet, translator, a writer who experiments with forms of expression deeply rooted in Western culture but with the intent of renovating it, Andrés Barba offers us a wonderfully mysterious object, impossible to classify, which is many things at once: a hyper-realist fable “with a suspended moral”, a political morality tale, a puzzle from which too many pieces are wilfully left out, a pretend factual account addressing troubling issues.

A band of wild, disturbingly different children descends upon the sleepy San Cristobal, a sub-tropical town surrounded by a relentless jungle, in a setting that is both real and imaginary, like Garcia Marquez’s. Nobody knows who these children are, nor where they come from. They soon turn out to be “ingeniously malignant”; they speak a new magic language that gives things new, inventive names; they have no recognizable leader, they snatch bags, steal, establish a counter-town in the city’s sewers, they attack and destroy a supermarket as though they were following the orders of a biological software.

Their radical difference, which will provoke a ruthless reaction, ends up by revealing the frailty of the instruments we rely on to interpret events: inadequate and self-indulgent, incapable of going beyond the convenient stereotypes of what we consider rationality, and reading reality.

The objectivity of the reconstruction, written twenty years later by an anonymous social services employee, is fictitious and conveyed by the very strict writing structure, so controlled as to appear natural. Thus, what looks like a sociological investigation becomes a powerful metaphorical instruction manual on the nature of evil, on the false vision we have of childhood, but also on the fatal attraction we feel for anything that threatens us: “We are fascinated by that which excludes us,” writes the author. A sharp novel, penned with a firm hand, which makes Andrés Barba a writer of the kind that European literature needs most.

ELIF BATUMAN, L’IDIOTA translated by Martina Testa – Einaudi

It is 1995 and Selin is a freshman at Harvard. Emails are a novelty: you no longer have to wait weeks and then run down to your mailbox to collect a letter. And this disrupts – among other things – the rhythm of human relations.

It is with his anachronism that Elif Batuman begins The Idiot, undoubtedly one of the most amazingly original novels published in 2018, acclaimed in the United States and elsewhere as one of the most outstanding books of the year, which very nearly won her the Pulitzer prize. Batuman, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010, has written a book that is not properly a novel: like all books that truly leave their mark, it is an unidentified literary object, falling somewhere in between an autobiography, a memoir and a bildungsroman.

It contains all the favourite subjects of this American writer of Turkish origin, whom we had already met in The Possessed, a collection of irresistible essays on Russian writers. And the subjects are: the Russian language, second-generation immigrants, and a highly contagious propensity to laugh at oneself. To choose the clearly Dostoyevskian title The Idiot for what is a sort of autobiography, albeit fictionalized, is obviously going in the same direction.

Although technically her first novel, this book has the solidity of something written in a writer’s full maturity. Batuman succeeds in a miraculous feat that very few writers achieve: she has written a work of high-level literature, full of learned literary references, which reads like an amusing sit-com. Unlike a sit-com, though, the effects of this book will be lasting, just as the literary fame of this writer will undoubtedly last for a long time, since she is destined to leave her mark on literature for many years.

STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK, OLIVER LOVING translated by Massimo Ortelio – Neri Pozza

After his intense first novel The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block gives us definitive evidence of his talent with a novel that grabs the reader and obliges him to address the nightmares and ethical dilemmas of our age. In a small West Texas town, the massacre perpetrated by a young Mexican immigrant at the school’s annual dance plunges seventeen-year-old Oliver Loving into a deep coma for ten years, breaks up a family, disrupts a community and triggers a wave of xenophobia. The young man who tried to avoid being noticed becomes a ghost hovering over the wounded town: a silent oracle, an obsession, a regret.

Block has written a novel about the effort that we need to put into hope, about the cruel cost of hope, and about time suspended, held in limbo by a coma: where the characters are forced to discover who they really are, in order to attempt a rebirth. A novel on the dramatic choices that chance, or destiny, forces upon us: shouldering the responsibilities of adult life, which seems to be the prerogative of women and which turns Oliver’s mother into a guardian of hope; or suppression of memory, or escape, which characterize the surrender of Oliver’s father and brother, but also of the girl he was in love with. Block maps our frailties with a masterful touch, using a compassion that is born of ruthlessness, and offers us cyphered instructions for a possible emancipation which can lead us back into humanity.

Block has succeeded in a double task: he provides a lucid x-ray of recent America and the gun violence that devastates her, and he bravely penetrates the heart of darkness of the family, the place where the main plot of all great novels always ultimately unfolds.

OLGA TOKARCZUK, I VAGABONDI translated by Barbara Delfino– Bompiani

“Mobility is reality,” says the nameless female narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s memorable and beautiful novel Flights. In the original Polish, the novel was titled “Bieguni,” a word describing a group of Slavic wanderers who, like modern mystics, seek salvation in constant motion. To convey this never-ceasing mobility, Tokarczuk builds a story of stepping-stones, of glimpsed-at events and characters never told till the end, all these as if seen from the window of a speeding car. “My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking,” the narrator informs us. In fact, the world is presented to us as a cabinet of curiosities, full of strange specimens, bizarre formations, freaks and marvels. Flights takes us on a magical journey through time and space, from the XVII century of the Dutch anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon to our own bewildering time, passing through the XIX century of Chopin when, after his death, the composer’s sister carried his heart back to Warsaw as a sacred reliquary. Flights is a travel log, a philosophical journal, a commonplace book of anecdotes, a collection of poetic vignettes, a masterful work of fiction and fact that Walter Benjamin foresaw when he spoke of “Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another.”

PREMIO GREGOR VON REZZORI – CITTÀ DI FIRENZE
FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A WORK OF FOREIGN FICTION

ENRICO TERRINONI with “ANTOLOGIA DI SPOON RIVER” by EDGAR LEE MASTERS – Feltrinelli

2018

GEORGE SAUNDERS, 2018 XII EDITION WINNER

GEORGE SAUNDERS, LINCOLN NEL BARDO – Feltrinelli Editore

Born in Texas in 1958, George Saunders has published four collections of stories: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation and Tenth of December. He is also the author of the famous Syracuse University Commencement Speech, published in book form as Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. He has won the National Magazine Award four times and the Folio award once in 2014. He was included in The New Yorker’s list of “twenty writers for the twenty-first century” and in 2013 he won the PEN/Malamud Award, the most prestigious American short story prize. He was included in Time magazine’s 2013 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Feltrinelli has published Italian versions of most of his books. In 2017 he won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo.

“George Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him,”

Jonathan Franzen

Motivation:

As well as being an extremely funny writer, George Saunders is a great poet of pain. Even his definition of humour is precise and serious: “humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”

His signature work, Lincoln in the Bardo, which in 2017 earned him the Man Booker Prize, explores in particular the pain of a father contending with the disembodied voices of lost and saved souls. With accents belonging to a variety of social classes, historical periods and ethnicities, the souls speak of all the mysteries of existence in the afterlife, until Lincoln utters the word “death” and the ghostly voices fade away. Like a modern Dante, but without the same systematic geography, consoling faith, or earthly rancour, Saunders has imagined in great detail a gloomy underworld.

Saunders has written short stories, novellas, essays, a novel, and even children’s books, one of which was awarded a prize in Italy. He warned the modern writer against making judgements, counselling them instead to remain supremely open to experience. He has followed his own advice perfectly.

2018 XII EDITION FINALISTS

KATIE KITAMURA, UNA SEPARAZIONE – Bollati Boringhieri

Born in California in 1979 to parents of Japanese origin, today she lives in New York and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the London Consortium. A martial arts enthusiast, she published her first novel, The Longshot, in 2009, which was followed by Gone to the Forest, a finalist in the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She collaborates with The New York Times, The Guardian and Frieze, among others.

ANDREÏ MAKINE, L’ARCIPELAGO DELLA NUOVA VITA – La Nave di Teseo

Born in Siberia in 1957, today he lives in France, where he has won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. He has published more than a dozen novels, translated into over four languages. Among these are Le Testament français, La Musique d’une vie and L’Amour humain. In 2016 he was elected to the Académie Française.

LAWRENCE OSBORNE, CACCIATORI NEL BUIO – Adelphi

Lawrence Osborne was born in England and studied modern languages at Cambridge and Harvard. He lived in Paris for ten years, where he wrote his first novel, Ania Malina, and later his travel diary, Paris Dreambook. He has lived in New York since 1992, interspersing his periods of activity in the Big Apple with long stints in East Asia.
He has written for The New York Times, Salon, The New Yorker, The Financial Times, The New York Observer, New York Magazine, Forbes, Conde Nast Traveler, Gourmet and Men’s Vogue.
As well as Ania Malina and Paris Dreambook, he has written the essay collection The Poisoned Embrace and a controversial book on autism entitled American Normal. In Italy he has published Il turista nudo (2006), Shangri-la (2008) and Bangkok (2009), all with Adelphi.

DAVID SZALAY, TUTTO QUELLO CHE È UN UOMO – Adelphi

Born in Montreal in 1974, David Szalay grew up in the United Kingdom and studied at Oxford. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won the Betty Trask Award, and was followed by Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011). He was included in Granta’s list of the Best Young British Novelists, 2013. In 2016 All That Man Is was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

PREMIO GREGOR VON REZZORI FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A WORK OF FOREIGN FICTION

CLAUDIO GROFF

For admirable translations of RILKE, KAFKA, BERNHARD, SCHULZE, HANDKE, and GRASS.

2017

MATHIAS ÈNARD, 2017 XI EDITION WINNER

MATHIAS ÈNARD BUSSOLA (LA BOUSSOLE) – e/o

Mathias Enard was born in 1972 in Niort, near Bourdeaux. He studied Persian and Arabic at L’Ecole du Louvre and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years. Among a number of notable prize, such as the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre for Zone, and the Prix Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient for Rue des Voleurs (Street of Thieves), in 2015 Enard was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Boussole (Compass).

Motivation:

Mathias Enard’s Compass (Boussole), his eighth novel and the winner of the 2015 Goncourt prize, records the thoughts of the narrator, Franz Ritter, as he passes through a sleepless night in Vienna. Ritter is a musicologist who is a specialist in the music of the Orient. Ritter, whose mind seems to encompass an entire cultural history, alternates between fevers, memories and opium dreams. In fragments, Ritter relives his many trips to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, Palmyra and Tehran. The book is also a celebration of Ritter’s romance with Sarah, a scholar who studies the attraction of the Orient on various adventurers.

In the twilit melancholy of this novel (Ritter has just received a frightening medical diagnosis), Ritter displays a staggering erudition. In fact, Enard’s brilliant book revels in the deep cultural knowledge most novelists only hint at our generalize about; Enard, by contrast, assumes his reader is as intelligent and as informed as he is. The fevered knowledge represented in Compass embraces centuries, a vast cast of characters and many lands; it is the frail bridge between two imperilled cultures.

2017 XI EDITION FINALISTS

LÁSZLÓ KRASNAHORKAI SATANTANGO – Bompiani

László Krasznahorkai is considered one of the most important living Hungarian writers; his style has been compared to Kafka and Beckett. He was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, and worked for some years as an editor until 1984, when he became a freelance writer. He has written five novels of which two have been translated into Italian: Satantango and Melancholia. Among his many prizes are the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance, the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Several of his works have been turned into feature films by Hungarian film director Béla Tarr.

EDUOARD LOUIS STORIA DELLA VIOLENZA (HISTOIRE DE LA VIOLENCE) – Bompani

Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule, was born and raised in the town of Hallencourt in the North of France, which is the setting of his first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule. The book was the subject of extensive media attention and was hailed for its literary merit and compelling story. The book also gave rise to debate and controversy over the perception of the working class. It was a bestseller in France and has been translated to over 20 languages. In 2016, Louis published his second novel, Story of Violence. In recounting the story of his rape and attempted murder on Christmas Eve of 2012, the autobiographical novel centers on the cyclical and self-perpetuating nature of violence in society.

VALERIA LUISELLI LA STORIA DEI MIEI DENTI (LA HISTORIA DE MIS DIENTES) – La Nuova Frontiera

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. Granta published her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, in 2012, and her collection of essays, Sidewalks, in 2013. Her second novel, The Story of My Teeth, is forthcoming from Granta. She has been named as one of the 20 best Mexican writers under 40 received a National Book Foundation ‘5 under 35’ award. Her style of exhilerating irreverance shows kinship with writers as diverse as Pound, Benjamin and Vila Matas.

CLEMENS MEYER ERAVAMO DEI GRANDISSIMI (ALS WIR TRÄUMTEN) – Keller

Clemens Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle an der Saale, then East Germany. Meyer won great attention for his first novel Als wir träumten (As We Were Dreaming), published in 2006; it received the Rheingau Literatur Preis and has been adapted into a feature film. His second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter (All the Lights, 2008), won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Gewalten (Acts of Violence), his third book, was published in 2009 and his 2013 novel Im Stein (Bricks and Mortar) was included in the long list for the International Man Booker Prize.

PREMIO GREGOR VON REZZORI

FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A WORK OF FOREIGN FICTION

ANNA D’ELIA

TERMINUS RADIOSO di Antoine Volodine (66thand2nd) Born in Milan, D’Elie lives and works in Rome. After studying Comparative Literature in Italy and France, she has been working for over ten years in the field of university publishing, which she left in 2001 to dedicate herself exclusively to French literary translation.
For twenty years she has collaborated with numerous Italian publishers including Bompiani, Rizzoli, Fazi, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Carocci, Sossella, and lately with 66thand2nd. D’Elia has translated texts by Jean Hatzfeld, Eric Reinhardt, Antoine Volodine, Serge Halimi, and among classics, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Honoré de Balzac.
Over the last twelve years D’Elia has devoted herself to the translation and theatrical adaptation of contemporary French playwrights, including Philippe Minyana, Pierre Notte, Jean-Marie Besset, Eugène Durif, Rémy Devos, Guillaume Gallienne, Fabrice Melquiot, Xavier Duranger.
In 2011 D’Elia was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française for her literary translations.

2016

MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU, 2016 X EDITION WINNER

MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU ABBACINANTE. IL CORPO. (Blinding) – Voland – Translation by Bruno Mazzoni

Mircea Cartarescu was born in Bucharest in 1956. He is a poet, novelist, musician and journalist, a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union, the Romanian PEN and the European Cultural Parliament. He is one of the most interesting writers from Eastern Europe. He has won many important prizes, both in Romania and internationally, such as the 2012 Berlin Prize for Literature, the 2013 Spycher-Leuk in Switzerland and the 2015 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. His books published in Italy are: The Levant (1990), Nostalgia (1993), Travesti (1994), and Blinding (1996-2007).

Motivation

One of the most dazzling and original books of our epoch, Blinding is filled with hallucinatory insects, half-human, bugs and butterflies, as in Naked Lunch. It is a mythical autobiography like José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso. It is as original and inventive as One Hundred Years of Solitude, and will probably inspire as many other writers in as many languages. But it is pointless to make so many comparisons since it is utterly original:unique.

It has a strong medical theme as we visit several times Bucharest’s hopelessly inadequate clinics—and the narrator fries hisbrains out when, unattended, he administers to himself electro-shocks. He shares a ward with two psychopathic, sadistic girls who pretend to be well behaved whenever a nurseor doctor is present but otherwise plot to humiliate and hurt him.

The narrator is weirdly attached to his mother and has grotesque fantasies about her. He is often shunted down mysterious chutes (under a tree, beneath the hospital) intodazzling worlds populated by thousands of hybrid monsters. The history of Rumania and the unremarkable life of Mircea roll past,strangely intertwined but always in nightmarish versions. Everything obeys an oneiric logic—sudden shifts in scale, probability, location and genera. One moment we are in a high-rise Soviet-style apartment bloc, a structure outfitted with an eerie elevator (a butterfly hatchery) and mysterious, tenantless floors, and the next moment we are in a public park contemplating busts of national heroes.

The writing is so electric and unpredictable that the reader can’t turn the pages fast enough.The book we are reading is often invoked, even as it is being written. The urban and village life of Rumania is juxtaposed. The narrator as child has his own mythic perception of the bombing of Bucharest in World War II. Human sacrifice, fantasies about New Orleans, religious heresies, endless screaming—this book is on the very border of madness, like Les Chants de Maldoror. Perhaps it is held together by its innocent, questing, youthful narrator, who fears everything, accepts everything, studies everything. This is a book of marvels, a circus populated by beauties and beasts, a text that bursts through the doors of perception and regales us with prodigies of imagery and invention. Because it is alternately evil and enchanting, it is always fresh and unpredictable. Catarescu is a modern prose Hieronymous Bosch and Blindingis his Garden of Earthly Delights.

2016 X EDITION FINALISTS

DANY LAFERRIÈRE TUTTO SI MUOVE IN TORNO A ME (The world is moving around me) – 66thand2nd – Translation by Giuseppe Grimonti Greco and Francesca Scala

Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953, and in 1976 left his country to settle in Montreal. After a variety of work, he became well-known as a journalist. In 1985, he published his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, later made into a film. In 2009, he won the Prix Médicis with his book The Return. In 2013, he was elected to the Académie Française on the first round of balloting, occupying the “seat of Montesquieu,” becoming not only the first Haitian and the first Canadian to receive the honor, but also the second black writer ever to have been inducted. His books published in Italy are: Heading South (2006), Down Among the Dead Men (2006) and The World Is Moving Around Me (2010).

YIYUN LI PIÙ GENTILE DELLA SOLITUDINE (Kinder than solitude) – Einaudi – Translation Laura Noulian

Yiyun Li was born in Beijing in 1972. In 1996, she graduated from Medical School and subsequently moved to the USA. She now lives in California. Her pieces have been published in magazines such as «The Paris Review», «Glimmer Train», «Prospect» and «The New Yorker», which in 2010 named her as one of the twenty best novelists under 40. In the same year, she received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), won the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Guardian First Book Award for Fiction. Her other books published in Italy are: The Vagrants (2009) and Kinder Than Solitude (2014).

DINAW MENGESTU TUTTI I NOSTRI NOMI (All our names) – Frassinelli – Translation by Mariagiulia Castagnone

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa in 1978. At the age of two he moved with his family to join his father in the USA during the “Red Terror.” His first two books, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and How to Read the Air (2010), immediately received the attention of critics, and he was awarded some of the most prestigious prizes in the USA, such as the Guardian First Book Award, Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2012 he received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. All Our Names (2014) is his third novel.

LORRIE MOORE BARK (Bark) – Bompiani – Translation by Alberto Pezzotta

Lorrie Moore was born in the USA in 1957. She has contributed to «The Paris Review» and her first short story in «The New Yorker» was included by John Updike in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has received many honors, among them the 1988 O’Henry Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Birds of America. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005. Her other books published in Italy are: Self-Help (1985), Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), A Gate at the Stairs (2009) and Bark (2014).

PREMIO GREGOR VON REZZORI

FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A WORK OF FOREIGN FICTION

FULVIO FERRARI

L’ARTE DI COLLEZIONARE MOSCHE by Fredrik Söjberg (Iperborea)

Fulvio Ferrari was born in Milan in 1955. He studied at the University of Turin, Milan and Stockholm. Since 1981 he has worked as a literary translator, translating first from German, then from Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. During his activity as a translator he edited the Italian versions of some nordic texts and dutch medieval texts. Among the authors translated by Fulvio Ferrari are Hölderlin, Klaus Mann, Sven Delblanc, August Strindberg, Göran Tunström, Stig Dagerman, Fredrik Sjöberg, Knut Hamsun, Cees Nooteboom and Adriaan van Dis. He is currently Director of the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Trento.

2015

VLADIMIR SOROKIN, 2015 IX EDITION WINNER

LA GIORNATA DI UN OPRIČNIK (Day of the Oprichnik) – Atmosphere Libri – Translation by Denise Silvestri

Vladimir Sorokin was born in Moscow in 1955. He has worked as a scriptwriter, playwright, painter, graphic designer and a librettist for the Bolshoi Theatre. Provocative and irreverent, he owes his international renown to his novel The Queue (NYRB 1985). Ice, which came out in Russia in 2002, was published by NYRB Classics in 2011. His books have been translated into 22 languages. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a member of Russian PEN.

Motivation:

Vladimir Sorokin’s novel is set in an imaginary Russia in 2028. It narrates one day in the life of an oprichnik: a reference to a secret police force created by Ivan the Terrible in 1565 with the purpose of eliminating his enemies, often by brutal and bloody means.

In the world of the novel, the excesses of the empire under Ivan the Terrible, and of modern Russia under Putin, are amplified in ingenious and horrifying ways.

No detail is spared, from the gang rape of a noble’s wife who is found hiding in a giant oven, to the visit of the oprichniks to a steam-bath, where they enjoy a drug-enhanced orgy amid kvass vapor, then relax by listening to Rachmaninoff and sipping “Szechuan champagne.” The latter-day oprichniki ride, instead of black horses, red “Mercedovs,” with severed dog-heads on the hood.

One of the most special things about the book is the language Sorokin invents for his new Russia: a mash-up of business jargon, Russian imperial dictates, Soviet propaganda, and the language of folktales.

At a first glance, DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK seems like a book that landed on earth from another planet—but it has a clear place in the Russian tradition. We can see the heritage of the two great satirical novelists, Gogol and Bulgakov, in the baroque accumulation of details, the interweaving of fantasy and reality, the relentlessness of the action. Of course there are echoes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And the dizzying combination of linguistic registers makes us think of Dostoevsky.

But we love Sorokin, not just because he continues the tradition of the past, but because he makes it utterly new, funny, and terrifying. Edmund White called Sorokin a “black diamond,” and I can’t think of a better description.

2015 IX EDITION FINALISTS

DAŠA DRNDIĆ TRIESTE (Trieste) – Bompiani – Translation by Ljiljana Avirovic

Daša Drndić was born in Croatia. She graduated from the University of Belgrade – the Faculty of Philology, in the English Language and Literature department, with a Fullbright scholarship. She continued her studies in Theatre and Communications in the United States, finally earning her doctorate with research on The Left and Proto-Feminism at the University of Reika, Croatia. She has written 30 radio plays, prose and poems. As a novelist she has been translated into English, French, Polish, Slovenian, German and Slovakian.

ANDREW MILLER PURA (Pure) – Bompiani – Translation by Sergio Claudio Perroni

Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960 He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland, France and now in Somerset. His debut novel, Ingenious Pain, was published in 1997 and won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for fiction; the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. This was followed by five subsequent novels, including Pure, which in 2011 won the Costa Book of the Year Prize. Hi novel Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award in 2001. Pure was a finalist for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize at the Southbank Sky Arts Award and the Independent Booksellers Award.

GUADALUPE NETTEL IL CORPO IN CUI SONO NATA (The Body Where I Was Born) – Einaudi – Translation by Federica Niola

Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico City in 1973. She is the author of four short story collections, including Pétalos y otras historias incómodas (2008) and El matrimonio de los peces rojos (2013), as well as the novel, El huésped (2006). She has received various international awards including the Antonin Artaud prize in 2008, the Anna Seghers Award in 2009 and the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award in 2013. The Body Where I Was Born is her first book to be translated into Italian.

TOMMY WIERINGA QUESTI SONO I NOMI (These Are The Names) – Iperborea

Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 in the Netherlands, near the border with Germany. His debut novel was published in 1995, but he achieved international renown in 2002 with the novel Alles over Tristan, which won him the Halewijn prize and a nomination for the prestigious AKO Prize. With Joe Speedboat he won the Bordewijk prize in 2006 and with These are the Names he received critical acclaim, with comparisons to Salinger, John Irving and Paul Auster. He writes for a wide range of publications and is a columnist for De Volkskrant.

PREMIO GREGOR VON REZZORI

FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A WORK OF FOREIGN FICTION

FEDERICA ACETO

End Zone, by Don DeLillo (Einaudi)

Federica Aceto graduated in modern languages and literature at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples. Afterwards she spent several years in Ireland where she completed a Masters in Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin and worked there as a language assistant in the department of Italian studies. She has been translating English-language fiction since 2004. Among the authors she has translated are Martin Amis, JG Ballard, Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, AL Kennedy and Ali Smith. In addition to her translating work, she teaches English language at Rebibbia prison.

2014

2014 VIII EDITION WINNER

Best Foreign Fiction

Maylis de Kerangal, Nascita di un ponte (Feltrinelli)

This year Maylis de Kerangal with Birth of a bridge – Feltrinelli, a translation by Maria Baiocchi and Alessia Piovanello – is the winner of the eighth edition of the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for the best foreign fiction work translated in Italy. Maylis de Kerangal is the author of seven books: Birth of a Bridge also won both the prix Franz Hessel and prix Médicis in the same year as well as being a finalist for the Goncourt, Femina and Flore prizes. She has also worked as the editor of Éditions du Baron and in May will release the fictional pop homage, Dans les rapides.

Motivation

“In times of solipsism, of narratives intimidated by a world too big to be related, a choral and epic novel like Birth of a bridge, comes as a meteor. The story is one of a pharaonic bridge that struggles to be raised in an imaginary America where jungle and future go hand in hand day after day. But this story is above all the one of every single men and women that are heading, from all over the planet, towards this bridge. Everyone with its own story and with their families shattered from the New World that the Bridge somehow symbolises. And there they are, all together: a magnet, and with it a myriad of iron filings that make time and space go back.

Someway it is like a reversed furore this book of Maylis de Kerangal: not the misery that puts masses in motion – altogether – but the exact opposite, the money that rises up to the sky in the shape of a bridge, like a sun of the future made of steel and calculations, sweat, screws and bolts. A choir of voices in common, literature that accepts the challenge of narrating the whole world and not just a splinter stuck who knows where. And all held together by an intense language, attentive to detail, so pressing. It’s this language the true miracle of this novel, the evidence of a writer who still demands everything from literature, facing the world directly in the eyes.

2014 VIII EDITION FINALISTS

Leopoldo Brizuela, Una Stessa Notte (Ponte alle Grazie)

Leopoldo Brizuela (Argentina, 1963) is a novelist, translator and one of the leading Argentine writers of his generation. His novel England won the prestigious Clarin Award, he has translated the works of writers including Henry James and Flannery O’Connor and was awarded the Premio Alfaguara in 2012 for The Same Night, published in the UK by Thames River.

Dave Eggers, Ologramma per il re (Mondadori)

Dave Eggers (USA, 1970) is the author of nine books, including The Circle (2013), The Wild Things (2009) and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001). He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. Together with his wife, Vendela Vida, he wrote the script for the film Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 Valencia, a network tutoring centers around the US. He lives in Northern California with his family.

Georgi Gospodinov, Fisica della malinconia (Voland)

Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria, 1968) is a poet, novelist, playwright and screenwriter, as well as the most translated Bulgarian author since 1989. Four of his poetry collections have been awarded national literary prizes but it was, Natural Novel (2010) published in 23 languages, that lead to his international acclaim. Physics of Sorrow which has already won the National Award for Best Novel of the Year, will be published by Open Letter in US this Autumn. He lives and works in Sofia.

Tom McCarthy, C (Bompiani)

Tom MaCarthy (England, 1969) is a writer and artist whose work has been translated in 20 languages. His widely praised first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema. C, was a finalist for the Man Booker in 2010 and the Walter Scott Prize. In addition, he is the founder of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, artists and philosophers. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.

2013

2013 VII EDITION WINNERS

Best Foreign Fiction

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
(Ponte alle Grazie, 2012, translation by Silvia Sichel)

Vasquez was born in Bogotà in 1973. In 2011, he was the unanimous winner of the Alfaguara – one of the most prestigious prizes in Spain. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and currently lives in Bogotà. His previous novels have been translated into fourteen different languages. In Italy, Ponte alle Grazie has published Storia segreta del Costaguana (2008) and Gli informatori (2009).

Motivation

Juan Gabriel Vasquez is among the most significant living South American novelists.

Vásquez was born in Bogota, Columbia, and, having lived many years in Europe, has returned to live in Bogota again. His fiction faces, unflinchingly, the particularly grim set of realities that pervade Columbia, where much of the international drug trade is centered. Vasquez has said, “I was born when the drug business started, with American ‘businessmen’ who found Colombian cocaine could generate incredible revenues.”

Vásquez’s new novel, The Sound of Things Falling, is a story of conspiracies and assassinations, of people confronting mysteries that, if solved, might help them repair their shattered lives. It’s noir, raised to the level of art. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also a profound meditation on fate and mortality.

Vásquez’s scope is enormous, ranging from intimate human encounters to crimes that affect entire populations. He produces the most harrowing, moving UN-magical realism imaginable. He traces the connections between our ordinary, everyday lives and the forces that, if left unchallenged, control and distort and undo our lives. Which is a potent form of magic indeed.

Best Translation

Alessandro Fo, Virgil’s Aeneid

Motivation

Alessandro Fo is not only a scholar and a translator of the first order, he is also a poet and a teacher. This is a devotion, an ethical responsibility not just to preserve and to cherish, but to reaffirm and reestablish that which has prompted Fo to take on this huge object of study and also to battle to the very limits to give voice to Virgil’s unattainable model. Fo has worked, and fought, to “limit the loss”. We maintain, however, that he has radiantly overcome the odds, and that his version is an authentic act of restitution to our time of the original and the universe that turned around it. And for that, we are grateful.

Finalists

Jennifer Egan, Look At Me (Minimum Fax)

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door (Feltrinelli)

Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His books have been published in 33 languages. In 2007 Keret had won With Shira Geffen the Cannes Film Festival’s “Camera d’Or” Award and The SACD Best Director Award for Their feature film Jellyfish, In 2010 he had received the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2010). Keret Teaches Hebrew Literature in Ben Gurion University.

Atiq Rahimi, A Curse on Dostoevsky (Einaudi)

Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghan writer and filmmaker.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Mondadori)

Jeanette Winterson, OBE, is the author of ten novels, including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a globally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? as well as numerous short stories, essays, children’s books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival.

2012