Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Arsita, 1962) won in 2024 with L'età fragile, a novel about the relationship between a mother and her 20-year-old daughter who were forced to live together during the Covid-19 lockdown and whose lives are also linked by some tragic events in their local community from decades before.
In the video below, the announcement is followed by a detailed presentation of the winning novel (playback starts at 7:31):
The 2024 prize went to Neige Sinno (Vars, France, 1977) for her thinly-veiled autobiographical novel, Triste tigre (lit. "Sad tiger", 2023, Italian translation: Triste tigre, tr. Luciana Cisbani), which recounts the repeated sexual abuse suffered by the author from age 7 to 14 from her stepfather and the author's decision to bring the abuser to trial years later.
The Premio Strega was launched in Rome in 1947 by writers Goffredo e Maria Bellonci (with the contribution of Guido Alberti, manufacturer of Strega liquor from which the prize took its name) to revitalize the cultural life of the country after the devastation of World War II.
Through the decades, the winning titles have aimed at widening in the Italian reading public the perception and consciousness of changes occurring in the country in terms of economy, culture and society.
2024 - Triste Tigre by 
2023 - V13: Chronicle of a Trial by
A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France's leading nonfiction writer. Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history--featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris--was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness. V13 isn't so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it--a city within the city, home to the innocent and the guilty, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil--and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.
2022 (joint) - First Blood by
WINNER OF THE 2021 RENAUDOT PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2022 STREGA EUROPEAN PRIZE A moving fictionalized account of Nothomb's own father, who died of Covid related symptoms in early 2020, this is the acclaimed author's most personal and heartfelt novel. The Republic of the Congo, 1964. A young man faces a firing squad, preparing for his last moment on Earth. He is known as a complex and complicated man whose childhood left him hungry for affection and attention and who transformed his emotional wounds into a brilliant career as a diplomat and a negotiator. Now he finds himself negotiating for his own life, together with the lives of 1,500 Congolese citizens. Inspired by the life of her father and by her lifelong effort to understand him, Amélie Nothomb's new novel is about life-and-death decisions, about reckoning with one's past, reconciling with one's parents, and about the hard, often humorous work of determining one's own path.
2022 (joint) - The Light and the Dark by
The only author to win all three major Russian literary prizes (including the Russian Booker Prize), Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Russian literary figures. The Guardian said of Shishkin's writing: "richly textured and innovative. . . arguably Russia's greatest living novelist." The Wall Street Journal raved that "Shishkin has created a bewitching potion of reality and fantasy, of history and fable, and of lonely need and joyful consolation. An exquisite novel... His sovereignty is over the invisible and the timeless. Mr. Shishkin traces this sad story with great beauty and finesse." In The Light and the Dark Shishkin has created an evocative love story of two young lovers, Vladimir, a solider flighting the Boxer Rebellion, and Alexandra. Known fondly to each other as Vovka and Sashka, the two young lovers sustain their love by writing passionate letters to each other. But as their correspondence continues, it becomes clear that the couple's separation is chronological as well as geographical--that their extraordinary romance is actually created out of, as well as kept alive by, their yearning epistolary exchange, which defies not only space but time. With this contrapuntal literary testament to the delirious, transcendent power of love, Mikhail Shishkin--the most celebrated Russian author of his generation--has created a masterpiece of modern fiction.
2021 - Time Shelter by
An award-winning international sensation--with a second-act dystopian twist--Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. "At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine's assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives--a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself. "A trickster at heart, and often very funny" (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from "one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers).
