The 79th Edition of The Strega Prize To Andrea Bajani's L'Anniversario

Andrea Bajani's L'Anniversario wins The Strega Prize 2025

While you were on vacation, Italians have announced their best book of the year. The second and final vote of the Strega Prize - the key indicator of the Italians' literary taste - proclaimed Andrea Bajani, with his novel L'Anniversario (The Anniversary) (Feltrinelli), the winner of the 79th edition.

As described by Emanuele Trevi, the winner of the same literary prize in 2021, L'Anniversario "is an extraordinary story, that of Bajani, one that breaks a true taboo: in the opening pages of the book we meet the protagonist, who tells us about the last time he saw his parents, before turning his back forever on his family - shattered by the violence of a tyrannical father and the mute, desperate submission of the mother.

To draw a credible picture of this domestic hell and of the protagonist’s flight with no return, the narrator uses the tools of the novel to bring order to the raw material of experience, making that daring leap capable of carrying him from the shapelessness of the “real” to the solidity and readability of the “true.” And only in this way can a singular story become a mirror in which all readers can glimpse something they did not directly know, and yet that concerns them.

It is a gripping and highly original novel, one that strikes the reader like a blow to the head and the stomach. Bajani feels no need either to condemn or to forgive, and he tells us how arduous - and how necessary - the path to redemption is."