Vittorio Bodini literary prize to Antonella Anedda

The poet Antonella Anedda, professor at USI Institute of Italian Studies, wins the sixth Vittorio Bodini International Literary Prize. The prize-winning collection is Historiae, published by Einaudi in 2018.

The award ceremony will take place on Friday, 6 December at Teatro Apollo in Lecce with an evening hosted by Carlo D'Amicis, on the theme "After the moon". Stefano Prandi, Director of the Institute of Italian Studies, shares some comments on the winning work: "Since her first book, Residenze invernali (Winter Residences) published in 1992, Antonella Anedda, who teaches at USI at the Institute of Italian Studies, has established herself as one of the most original poetic voices of our time. She has received many important international awards, the last of which is the Vittorio Bodini Prize (2019) for her latest collection of poems, Historiae. This book, inspired by the dry and essential prose of Tacitus, can be defined as a path to the origins that carefully looks to an end: from the author's own private history, with the recollection of childhood memories and the recent death of her mother; to the collective history, with the atrocity of wars, ancient and modern, and the tragic reality of migratory phenomena; and finally by the history of the cosmos, declined through references to the great models of Lucretius and Dante. But Historiae also dates back to the origins of the word, between Tacitus' Latin and Sardinian, a "barbarous" language linked to the biographical roots of the author, giving voice the courage to plunge into the darkness of the human heart and to welcome silence, it conquers the space of a "radiant alphabet".

Antonella Anedda is a poet and essayist. Born in Rome, she graduated in History of Modern Art with Augusto Gentili at the University La Sapienza in Rome and in 1982 she obtained a scholarship at the Fondazione Cini in Venice and collaborated with art critics in newspapers and magazines. She worked at the Museum of Popular Arts in Rome. She taught Linguistic Mediation at the Chair of Anglistics in Rome and then, until 2006, at the University of Siena, based in Arezzo. She began to collaborate with USI as a lecturer for the Master in Italian Literature and Civilisation and from 2014 for the Bachelor.

More information about the author.