The Strega Prize show

The five finalists for the seventy-ninth Premio Strega were announced last night at the Roman Theatre in Benevento by Donatella di Pietrantonio, the overall winner in 2024. The titles that passed the scrutiny: "L'anniversario" (Feltrinelli) by Andrea Bajani with 280 votes, "Quello che so di te" (Guanda) by Nadia Terranova with 226 votes, "Perduto è questo mare" (Rizzoli) by Elisabetta Rasi with 205 votes, "Chiudo la porta e urlo" (Mondadori) by Paolo Nori and "Inventario di quel che resta dopo che la foresta brucia" (TerraRossa) by Michele Ruol with equal scores, both with 180 votes. Not to mention that Bajani's "L'anniversario", just the day before, had also won the Strega Giovani, with 97 preferences out of a total of 595 expressed, was the most voted by a jury of girls and boys aged between sixteen and eighteen from over one hundred high schools.

626 out of 700 voters have expressed their preferences, between individual and collective votes: in addition to the jury of the four hundred Friends of Sunday, there are as usual two hundred and forty-five voters from abroad selected by thirty-five Italian Cultural Institutes around the world, each expressing seven jurors among scholars, translators and lovers of our language and literature, twenty-five collective votes from schools, universities and reading circles of the Libraries of Rome, thirty votes of strong readers chosen from the world of professions and business. The announcement of the winning book will be held on Thursday 3 July, at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, in the capital.

The series of censorships Paolo Nori unjustly suffered after the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, solely because of his boundless passion for Russian literature, with the resulting bitterness, finds an ideal counterbalance in this recognition. 'Chiudo la porta e urlo' is not a novel: it is a declaration of love, an act of faith in the literary horizon as an expression of personal resistance. Paolo Nori writes - as always - with a voice that seems not to want to write, but only to speak: yet every comma weighs, every digression builds an identity, every intimate anecdote becomes an epic of the everyday. The heart of the novel is Raffaello Baldini, a Romagnolo poet whom Nori restores with a devotion that is anything but courtly; but he makes it living, painful and even comic matter. However, Baldini, like Dostoevsky and Achmatova, is also a filter: it is through him that Nori looks at the world, and above all within himself. His writing is an unarmed self-fiction, in which the narrating self is never a hero, but rather a bastian contrary, accidentally surviving himself. And in this headlong descent into his own frailties, he achieves a very high form of intellectual honesty.

The acclaimed five will meet the public on eighteen stages, including as always one abroad, on 17 June, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw. The next day, however, for the first time in the history of the Prize, the finalists will land in Sardinia. The appointment is set for Wednesday 18, at 9pm, in the former barracks of Quartu Sant'Elena. And the evening will be conducted by Fabio Canino. The landing in Sardinia marks an important milestone for the promotion of books and reading on the island.