Marcello Fois's " L'impero distrazione " (Einaudi) narrowly won the 64th edition of the Campiello Prize , with 83 votes. The award ceremony took place for the first time on October 3rd in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Venice Lido. 282 votes were cast out of 300 by the Popular Jury of Anonymous Readers.
Fois remembered the writer and his friend Michela Murgia , who died in 2023, also mentioned in the dedication of his novel “L'impero distrazione”.
"Writing is a very difficult profession," Fois declared. " There's a huge difference between writers and publishers . I'm so grateful for this world. First of all, I want to thank someone who is no longer with us, but who is with me. She was a beautiful woman, far from spiteful, very resilient. Her name was Michela Murgia."
Ettore Manfredini, the ninety-year-old protagonist of the story in which Fois leaves Sardinia for Emilia, has just died, but he feels as if he's awakened and is reviewing what he's built, what he's lost, and what he's left behind, in a sort of assessment of his entire life, as if to say that we shouldn't wait until we die to stop and think about what we do . Fois, a Sardinian from Nuoro who lives with his family in Bologna, remembered Grazia Deledda during the evening: "I was born 200 meters from her house. Deledda is still the only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature . She was also the first woman to agree to run for office in 1919, when women were not allowed to do so, and she, 'scratching' a law that didn't prevent women from running but from voting, ran. A marvelous woman, whom we need today and whom we should remember in schools ."
(Unioneonline)