Andrea Bajani wins the Witch 2025 Award with “The Anniversary”

He was the most voted in the previous stages. Therefore, he was already the winner of the Strega Giovani Prize, he was the most talked about, he was the most “in sight” in bookstores. Nevertheless, Now Andrea Bajani con «The anniversary»The winner of the Witch award 2025the most influential Italian literary prize. Similarly, Nothing affects sales more, as nothing certifies the quality of a novel (as far as a prize can do it). Furthermore, So it is celebrated at home Feltrinelliwho had not even triumphed since 2005. Nevertheless, when Maurizio Maggiani was winning the prize with the night traveler. Moreover,

Proposed by Emanuele Trevi. Therefore, 128 pages long, “the anniversary” tells of an unhappy family, that composed of an authoritarian father, an invisible mother and two children crushed by an unsustainable situation. So much so that one of the two will choose, once andrea bajani wins witch 2025 an adult, to cut every link with the parents. In the first pages he is the one who tells us about the strange anniversary that he is experiencing: he has been ten years since the last time he has seen his father. mother.

Can you abandon your father and mother? You can slam the door, go down the stairs and decide that you will no longer see them? Questioning the origin, escaping its grip? The novel – with a voice “scandalously calm». As Emmanuel Carrère writes – faces this taboo with placid brutality, without sensationalism and rhetoric, but highlighting every small and great dynamic that can make a house a place you want to escape.

“The anniversary” is first of all a liberation novel, which unhinges and unmasks the family’s totalitarianism. He hurts us with his honesty, disarms us with his candor, he puts us bare with his truth. It is andrea bajani wins witch 2025 the slap received just born: thanks to that pain we breathe. The healing path does not end with the escape. which at times be the protagonist even more torments, but will mark his life for a long time. Until the writing of this novel, in one Deliberata Autofiction which leaves the real border between autobiography and fiction suspended.

Andrea Bajani ha 49 yearshe is the author of about twenty books (novels. collections of poems and essays) and had already been nominated for the Strega Prize in 2021 with his previous novel, “The book of houses”, always published by Feltrinelli. The anniversary won with 194 votes. The other candidate books were “lost this sea” by Elisabetta Rasy (Rizzoli). second with 133, “What I know of you” by Nadia Terranova (Guanda), 117 votes, “I close the door and scream” by Paolo Nori (Mondadori), 103 votes, and “inventory of what remains after the forest andrea bajani wins witch 2025 burns” of the debutant Michele Ruol (Terrarossa).