The English translation of the best seller Where you didn’t take me2023 Strega Prize finalist, was presented by the author Maria Grazia Calandrone to a room packed with British readers atItalian Cultural Institute of London. Calandrone was the protagonist of the book launch Your Little Matter, the translation of his penultimate work which was edited by Antonella Lettieri and published by the Foundry publishing house. In a conversation with journalist Rosie Goldsmith and Antonella Lettieri, the author told the complex and emotional story behind her book. «An extraordinary story – said Goldsmith – which testifies to the meticulous and tenacious research, a real investigation, carried out by Calandrone to find information about her natural mother».
«I wasn’t interested in discovering the truth about my origins – explained Calandrone – although I always knew I was adopted, I didn’t ask myself too many questions. Then, when I published the book dedicated to my adoptive mother, friends and acquaintances of my natural mother looked for me and at that point I could no longer resist.”
An incredible story emerged, a story of poverty, hardship, emigration, violence, unhappiness. A story with no happy ending. I was afraid when I started this journey to discover my birth mother – she said again – because I didn’t know what person I would meet. I discovered a woman prisoner of her marriage: a woman who had not been able to marry her first love for economic reasons, who was instead given in marriage to a violent man who did not know and could not love her, and who finally falls in love with another , and defying all the constraints of the time and ran away with him to the north, facing a life of marginalization and poverty, the life of the emigrants of those times”.
«An extraordinary event with an extraordinary writer and woman. I am really happy and honored to welcome Maria Grazia Calandrone here – he said the Director of the Institute Francesco Bongarrà – and grateful to the Foundry publishing house for publishing her book in English, thus giving the public in the United Kingdom and beyond the opportunity to get to know a wonderful Italian author.”
