The Strega Prize to Donatella Di Pietrantonio
"I will use my prize in defence of rights for which my generation fought hard and which are no longer taken for granted today," said the author
by Lara Ricci
3' min read
3' min read
With a novel dedicated "to all survivors", L'età fragile (Einaudi), Donatella Di Pietrantonio won the 2024 Strega Prize. "I am committed to using the notoriety that the prize confers in defence of rights for which my generation has fought hard and which today are no longer taken for granted," said the writer on receiving the award in the historic Roman venue of Villa Giulia.
Di Pietrantonio won 189 votes out of 644 cast (700 were the votes cast). They were followed by Dario Voltolini, author of Invernale (La nave di Teseo), with 143 votes; Chiara Valerio, whose Chi dice e chi tace (Sellerio) received 138 votes; Raffaella Romagnolo with Aggiustare l'universo (Mondadori), who received 83 votes; Paolo Di Paolo, whose Romanzo senza umani (Feltrinelli) received 66 votes and finally Tommaso Giartosio: Autobiogrammatica (Minimum Fax) achieved 25 votes.
In The Fragile Age a daughter who had only wished to leave the small Abruzzi village where she had grown up comes home by a whisker, on the last train before the lockdown of 2020. She locks herself in her room and barely speaks. She does not want to return to the Milan of which she had dreamed so much, nor does she want to continue her university studies, but she does not explain why. While she tries to guess what happened to her, her mother comes to terms with a terrible event that happened when she was a girl and that she had tried to forget. In the common experience of violence, the two women find themselves bound, but not united. Only the struggle, in this case in defence of nature, will restore a fragile understanding between them.
Dario Voltolini's Winter second classified novel, Winter, also speaks of trauma and its capacity to create a disconnection, a decentralisation, a painful and annihilating distance with the world. He tells of the time when the blood of his father, a butcher, mingled 'with the cold blood of the beast' he was slaughtering. Of the scream that silenced him and the pain that remained inside him.
Violence is also the burden that swung the existence of Vittoria, a magnetic and mysterious woman who one day settled - with a girl who could have been her daughter but was not - in Scauri, the hamlet in the province of Latina where Chiara Valerio was born. Chi dice e chi tace opens with her death. It is only at this moment that Lea, the protagonist, realises that not only did she know little about this person she had known for twenty years, but that what little she did know was wrong. The attempt to understand who Vittoria was, a woman who, she is told, liked her very much, becomes an interesting journey of self-discovery, or rather, of our multiple and even conflicting identities.
