Olbia: Nobel Prize Centenary, Unitre Celebrates Young Deledda

One hundred years after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Grazia Deledda, the Unitre (University of the Three Ages) of Olbia, under the patronage of the Municipality, is paying tribute to the writer with a highly significant event. On Thursday, March 5, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM, in the Aula Magna of the University of Olbia on Via Porto Romano, the event aims to refocus attention on a less explored phase of the author's work: her youth, when Deledda was not yet thirty and still living in Sardinia, immersed in the human, linguistic, and cultural universe that would later inform much of her most celebrated fiction.

Leading the audience on this journey will be philologist Giancarlo Porcu, a careful scholar and expert in Sardinian literature. His talk will focus on the young Deledda's poetic and narrative texts, rediscovered through meticulous research into contemporary journals and publications. In particular, the focus will be on her collaboration, in the late nineteenth century, with the Turin weekly Silvio Pellico, which published some of her writings that were subsequently forgotten. The recovery of these materials today allows for a careful and critical rereading, illuminating the writer's formative journey and following her stylistic and thematic development step by step.

An important piece in understanding not only the evolution of Deledda's writing, but also the Sardinian and national cultural context of the late nineteenth century. Giancarlo Porcu (Nuoro, 1972), who graduated in Modern Literature from Bologna and earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cagliari, combines his work as an editor—with over 160 works edited, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—with a consolidated philological and literary research dedicated to Sardinian literature in Sardinian, Italian, and Spanish. His monographs include studies on Pasquale Dessanai and on metrics between Sardinia and Spain, as well as award-winning works such as "A Rebel in the Shadow. Life and Work of Pasquale Dessanai" (Tullio De Mauro Prize). He has also edited critical editions and volumes dedicated to important Sardinian authors, including Deledda herself, of whom he has recently published rediscovered texts and innovative bibliographical contributions.