The Pisa Book Festival returns from 3 to 6 October with 90 publishers from all over Italy already confirmed, 100 events scheduled and 200 national and international guests, including the Swedish writer Bjorn Larsson, special guest of this edition. With the announcement of the trio of Translation Awards finalists, the curtain rises on the Pisan salon of independent publishing, an unmissable event for literature lovers. The scientific jury made up of Roberta Ferrari, Serena Grazzini, Lucia Della Porta, Giulietta Bracci Torsi, Enrico Di Pastena and Andrea Nuti named the finalists in the competition: Rosalba Molesi, with “The destiny that brought me to Trieste” by Radoslav Petkovic (Bottega Errante), Marco Federici Solari with “The Giant’s Bow” by Christoph Ransmayr (L’Orma), and Giulia Zavagna with “L’invincibile estate” by Liliana by Cristina Rivera Garza (Sur). The word now falls to the jury of experts (Susanna Basso, Bruno Mazzoni and Vanni Santoni), who, assisted by the reading group of the Pellegrini Bookshop, will decide the overall winner of the fourth edition. The awards ceremony will take place on 4 October at the Pisa Book Festival, on this occasion the lifetime achievement awards will also be awarded to Roberto Francavilla, the greatest translator of literature in the Portuguese language, and to Roberto Keller, a publisher who has explored literature with great intuition and passion Central European discovering, among other things, the Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller.
The special jury prizes go to Massimo Bacigalupo for poetry and to Joseph Farrell for the English translation of the theater by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. The theme of the XXII edition of the Festival will be the sea, a common thread that will unite the great literary classics such as Conrad and Stevenson with contemporaries who sang it in prose and verse, but also a tribute to Pisa and its glorious past as a republic seafaring. The formula of the exhibition center will be proposed again with 90 publishers’ stands at the Republican Arsenals and six large historical stages for events: the Fortilizio della Torre Guelfa, the Ship Museum, the Church of San Vito, Palazzo Reale, Palazzo Blu and the Royal Victoria Hotels. There will be no shortage of celebratory moments with a tribute to RJTolkien and an exhibition at Palazzo Blu dedicated to Yambo (150 years after his birth) which will serve as a preview of the Festival.
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