Andrea Bajani wins the Strega: 'even males must challenge patriarchy'
"L'anniversario" (Feltrinelli) won 194 votes, second place went to Elisabetta Rasy with 133 votes for "Perduto è questo mare" (Rizzoli), third to Nadia Terranova, with "Quello che so di te" (Guanda, 117 votes), fourth to Paolo Nori, with "Chiudo la porta e urlo" (Mondadori, 103 votes), fifth to Michele Ruol with "Inventario di quel che resta dopo che la foresta brucia" (TerraRossa, 99 votes)
by Lara Ricci
4' min read
4' min read
"Making literature means contradicting the official version. Today the official version is that of patriarchy. With L'anniversario I wanted to tell the story of the need for males to contest it too,' said the writer Andrea Bajani in the nymphaeum of Villa Giulia, in Rome, as he collected the Strega Prize 2025, which he won with 194 votes.
And indeed, it is precisely the rarity of a male writer who undertakes to analyse through literature the system of power that permeates society starting from its founding element, the family, and the destructive effects that this, and the violence inherent in it, produces not only on women, but also on men, that surprises and intrigues those who read The Anniversary (Feltrinelli).
The contestation of patriarchy, here, takes the form of a long portrait of the mother, told through analgesis starting from the last time the narrator (who is probably the author) saw her. Bajani traces in family episodes and in the very image the son had of his mother the effect of his father's actions and the culture in which they were immersed. Micro-violence, sometimes, such as saying 'this is a book for your mother' to say that it was ugly, or actual physical violence.
A portrait that is not easy because 'If I have never written about my mother, nor had a thought about her, it is because in order to do so she must be separated from my father', he writes. In order to do so, he relies on fiction, a 'device' that allows him to imagine a woman he never really knew, nor really paid attention to, because she was so crushed by a violent, despotic and self-centred man ('he wanted her to be nothing so that he could be something, and she wanted to be nothing so that being nothing was at least something'), that she became invisible even to herself. This is the original and dramatic idea at the heart of the book, which is developed with effectiveness and psychological finesse.
The protagonist's mother is not dead, but he has been denying himself to his family for ten years, having lost track of her. And the family of origin becomes a sort of 'phantom limb' for him. A choice that he does not live with the guilt of an abandonment, but as an evasion, as a claim to a right, the author clarified during the ceremony of the most famous Italian award. A decision that is still seen as scandalous, 'because scandalous is what people tell themselves but do not have the courage to tell others'.
