2025 - L'anniversario
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2024 - L'età fragile
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Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) won in 2025 with L'anniversario, a meditative novel about a man who at some point severed all contacts with his own family, as a reaction to a violent father and a submissive, co-dependent mother.
In the video below, a detailed post-announcement interview with the author:
The 2025 prize went to Paul Murray (Dublin, Republic of Ireland, 1975) for his satirical novel The Bee Sting (2023, Italian translation: Il giorno dell'ape, tr. Tommaso Pincio), which follows four members of a dysfunctional Irish family whose once-thriving business is reeling from the late 2000s "Great Recession".
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.
2025 - The Bee Sting
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One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, the Nero Gold Prize, and the Nero Book Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Writers' Prize for Fiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year One of TIME's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year A Dua Lipa x Service95 Book Club Pick From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart. The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he's on the brink of running away. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda's wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man? The Bee Sting, Paul Murray's exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
2024 - Triste Tigre
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2023 - V13: Chronicle of a Trial
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ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2024 One of the London Times's Nine Best Literary Nonfiction Books of the Year "Extraordinary . . . Absolutely gripping." --Chris Power, The Guardian "Moving and masterful . . . [A] magnificent book." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post 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 accused, 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
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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
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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
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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).
