PORDENONE – A little more than a month after the conclusion in Pordenone of the 30th edition of the Dedica festival, a literary review that confirms itself as unique in its kind and also for this reason it is so loved by writers and publishers, as well as by the public, the path of initiatives with which the Thesis association is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the event is enriched with an important novelty: the prestigious Treccani publishes a book “dedicated to Dedica”, which has already been in bookshops for a few days.
Signed by the festival curator Claudio Cattaruzza, published for the Treccani Libri/Visioni series edited by Paolo Di Paolo, entitled “Literature in restless times. Writing, imagining, changing the world”, will be presented as a national preview on Thursday 2 May, in Rome, at 6pm, in the Igea room of the Enciclopedia Italiana building, the prestigious headquarters of Treccani, and will feature alongside Cattaruzza and Di Paolo, in the role guest of honour, the writer Dacia Maraini, protagonist of Dedica in the 2000s edition.
The book, which will soon also be presented in Pordenone, collects a selection of the testimonies given by some of the authors involved over the years in the festival which for thirty years has represented a unicum in the panorama of Italian literary festivals: thanks to a formula that concentrates in an intense week of conversations, music, theatre, art, “Dedication” translates into a real immersion in the world of the writer who is the protagonist from time to time.
A “unicum” that aroused the interest of Treccani and as, underlines the editor of Dedica and the book, Claudio Cattaruzza, “constitutes an important recognition of the work carried out in these thirty years and enhances the monographs that have accompanied each edition ”, dedicated to the work and thoughts of the protagonist”.
Thus, as Paolo di Paolo underlines in the presentation of the volume, through Dedica “some of the greatest authors of our time take us into their intellectual construction site, revealing the reasons why they decided to dedicate their lives to writing, reconstructing the itinerary of their education through books and meetings, but above all by renewing the bet on a literature that can change the world if it raises the stakes.
And if, in the turbulence and disorientation of dark times, it encourages us to remain human.
The voices of the protagonist writers of Dedica included in the book are those of Gioconda Belli, Javier Cercas, Maylis de Kerangal, Yasmina Khadra, Björn Larsson, Claudio Magris, Dacia Maraini, Cees Nooteboom, Amos Oz, Luis Sepúlveda, Antonio Tabucchi, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
“In thirty years of Dedica Festival in Pordenone – we read in the introduction – the authors and guest authors, among the most relevant figures of international literature, found themselves reflecting on writing as an ethical commitment, as an experience of knowledge and transformation . They talked about the roots of their vocation, the construction site of the novel, the mechanisms and tools of creative work.
Therefore, some of the most intense testimonies offered over time to a unique event in the Italian cultural panorama are collected in these pages: its originality lies in the desire to get to know in depth an author, the absolute protagonist of the festival, different every year; in capturing the essential details, the ancestry, the reasons for inspiration in his work as a whole; in sharing and discussing each appointment with the author himself; and in weaving all this into an itinerary that involves the languages of art, theatre, cinema and music”.
