Pick a country to see its literary prizes and which of their books you can read in English.
Strega 2026 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Stone Guests”
Michele Mari
Novel · 159 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:After their final exams, the students of class III A sign a reckless pact binding them until their last day. Thirty years later, with a fabulous prize at stake, it becomes a ruthless contest to stay alive the longest.
Strega 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Teetering”
Alcide Pierantozzi
Novel · 232 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:From the inside, a man tells what happens when reality frays and lets hallucination in, when fear grips and the only way to live is on the edge of a precipice.
Strega 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sleepwalker”
Bianca Pitzorno
Novel · 408 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Since childhood Ofelia has fainted and woken with visions of the future. Fleeing a dangerous marriage, she settles in a Sardinian town in the late nineteenth century and earns her living as a 'renowned sleepwalker' telling fortunes.
Strega 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Camus's Widows”
Elena Rui
Novel · 168 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:On 4 January 1960 Albert Camus dies in a car crash. Four women, his wife, two actresses and a young Danish painter, are suddenly left 'widows' of the man they loved.
Strega 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Plato: A Love Story”
Matteo Nucci
Novel · 566 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:A summer morning in 415 BC: four boys sit on a rock above the port of Piraeus. One of them, twelve-year-old Aristocles, will later be called Plato. A friend tells the story of his life.
Strega 2026 · Shortlist
Teresa Ciabatti
Novel · 221 pages · Crime, Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer used to interviewing teenagers and celebrities is sent by her newspaper to interview a Camorra boss accused of 182 murders. As he talks about his losses and his family, she begins to be drawn in.
Strega 2025 · Winner
L’anniversario
Andrea Bajani
Novel · 144 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Ten years after walking out on his parents for good, a son tells the story of his family: a father who ruled the house through subtle violence and a mother who gave up everything to be something in his eyes.
Strega 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lost Is This Sea”
Elisabetta Rasy
Novel · 233 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:When the Neapolitan writer Raffaele La Capria, her friend and mentor, dies, a woman remembers the father she left behind as a girl in 1950s Naples, a city of light ravaged by war.
Strega 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Inventory of What Is Left After the Forest Burns”
Michele Ruol
Novel · 204 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The story of a family, Mother, Father, Elder and Younger, is told through the objects in the house where they lived and the events that split their lives into before and after.
Strega 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“What I Know About You”
Nadia Terranova
Novel · 261 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Holding her newborn daughter, a woman knows she can never allow herself to go mad. Madness in her family has a name, her great-grandmother Venera, who was once committed to the asylum in Messina.
Strega 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I Close the Door and Scream”
Paolo Nori
Novel · 202 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A sixty-year-old writer follows the poems of Raffaello Baldini, written in the dialect of Santarcangelo di Romagna, through archives and memory, and weaves them with his own life.
Strega 2024 · Winner
L’età fragile
Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Novel · 192 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:Thirty years ago, on a night when three girls vanished from a campsite in the Abruzzo mountains, Lucia was saved by chance. Now her grown daughter comes home from Milan and withdraws into silence.
Strega 2024 · Shortlist
Chi dice e chi tace
Chiara Valerio
Novel · 276 pages · Crime, Love
AI-generated summary:In the seaside town of Scauri, the elegant, elusive Vittoria, who arrived in the 1970s with a girl who is not her daughter, is found dead in her bath. Lea, the town lawyer, refuses to accept it as an accident.
Strega 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wintry”
Dario Voltolini
Novel · 140 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A son remembers his father, a butcher at a Turin market who seemed invincible, from the day a blade nearly takes off his thumb.
Strega 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Novel Without Humans”
Paolo Di Paolo
Novel · 214 pages
AI-generated summary:After a series of 'emotional accidents', a historian who has spent years studying a little ice age around Lake Constance sets off for the lake, trying to rebuild the memories others have of him.
Strega 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fixing the Universe”
Raffaella Romagnolo
Novel · 362 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:October 1945, in a village just freed from the Nazis: the young teacher Gilla, who fought in the Resistance, finds in her class a silent orphan girl whose past hides a family secret from the war.
Strega 2024 · Shortlist
Tommaso Giartosio
Novel · 440 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A writer retraces his life through language: learning the alphabet, family words, insults, jokes, foreign languages and poetry, alongside his parents, school, friendship and desire in an Italy of privilege and violence.
Strega 2023 · Winner
Come d’aria
Ada D’Adamo
Novel · 176 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A mother, once a dancer, writes to her severely disabled daughter, who can communicate only with her smile, about the life they share, bound to each other in complete dependence.
Strega 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Night Crossing”
Andrea Canobbio
Novel · 520 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Wandering through Turin among letters, diaries and medical records, a son tries to understand his father, a man whose depression made him distant and painful to reach.
Strega 2023 · Shortlist
Dove non mi hai portata
Maria Grazia Calandrone
Novel · 247 pages · Autofiction, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A poet reconstructs the story of her biological parents and their tragic end, from rural Molise to the outskirts of Milan in the boom years and to Rome.
Strega 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To Steal the Night”
Romana Petri
Novel · 260 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, from a spoilt, despotic childhood to his flights, crossings, wars and loves.
Strega 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I Simply Loved You”
Rosella Postorino
Novel · 349 pages · War, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:During the war in the former Yugoslavia, ten-year-old Omar waits at the window for a mother who does not come back, and only Nada, a girl of eleven, can calm him. Two boys and a girl who have lost everything are swept far from home.
Strega 2022 · Winner
Spatriati
Mario Desiati
Novel · 277 pages · Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:In a corner of rural Puglia, young people from the small provincial middle class are torn between a difficult love for their homeland and the urge to escape to big, inhospitable cities.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
E poi saremo salvi
Alessandra Carati
Novel · 239 pages · Migration, War, Family
AI-generated summary:Aida and her Bosnian family flee the war and reach Italy, where they must rebuild their lives: a domineering father, a mother who hides her love and a brother who falls ill.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“That Damned Vronsky”
Claudio Piersanti
Novel · 234 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A typesetter who has lost his job to new technology and his wife, a secretary who loves gardening, have lived in quiet devotion for decades, until one day she suddenly disappears.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
Fabio Bacà
Novel · 279 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Davide, a neurosurgeon living a quiet life in suburban Lucca, has always kept life's background noise at bay. But a more sinister vibration lurks beneath it, and any pretext, an argument at a traffic light or a quarrel with a neighbour, could make it unbearable.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Strays”
Marco Amerighi
Novel · 386 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Pietro Benati, a quiet, decent young man from a family that has fallen apart, drifts between Pisa and Madrid with two troubled friends, Dora and Laurent, in the first years of the new century.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nina on the Embankment”
Veronica Galletta
Novel · 219 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Caterina, known as Nina, a young engineer from Sicily, is sent to an imaginary town in the far north to direct the building of a river embankment, her first big project, among surveyors, councillors and workmen.
Strega 2022 · Shortlist
Niente di vero
Veronica Raimo
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A woman takes apart her own Italian family, in a flat where new walls and rooms keep appearing where there is no space, with irony and without any comforting rhetoric.
Strega 2021 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Two Lives”
Emanuele Trevi
Novel · 131 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer remembers two friends, the writers Rocco Carbone and Pia Pera, both of whom died young: one hounded by his inner furies, the other sensitive and prone to illusions, bound together by a deep friendship.
Strega 2021 · Shortlist
Il libro delle case
Andrea Bajani
Novel · 268 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A man known only as 'I' is told through the houses he has passed through, as a newborn, son, lover, intruder and father, each keeping the memory of who he was there.
Strega 2021 · Shortlist
Borgo Sud
Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Novel · 176 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On a long night journey to reach Adriana, her rebellious, reckless sister, a woman looks back on their bond and on the reluctant mother who wounded them both.
Strega 2021 · Shortlist
Il pane perduto
Edith Bruck
Novel · 126 pages · War, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A woman who survived deportation as a girl goes back into the depths of memory, from the hell her persecutors prepared to the life she rebuilt afterwards.
Strega 2021 · Shortlist
L’acqua del lago non è mai dolce
Giulia Caminito
Novel · 297 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Gaia grows up in a proletarian family ruled by her strong-willed mother, Antonia, who moves them from the edge of Rome to the lakeside town of Anguillara, where Gaia's shame and anger harden into violence.
Strega 2020 · Winner
Il colibrì
Sandro Veronesi
Novel · 400 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Marco Carrera lives a life of suspensions, fatal coincidences, terrible losses and absolute loves, always moving to stay where he is, from the 1970s into the near future.
Strega 2020 · Shortlist
Tutto chiede salvezza
Daniele Mencarelli
Novel · 176 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:June 1994, during the World Cup: after a violent outburst, twenty-year-old Daniele is committed for a week to a psychiatric ward, where he shares a room with five men on the margins of the world.
Strega 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Italian Boy”
Gian Arturo Ferrari
Novel · 310 pages · Coming of age, Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Ninni, a child of the postwar years, grows up in provincial Lombardy, rural Emilia and booming Milan, surrounded by women, and discovers through his grandmother the world that books open to him.
Strega 2020 · Shortlist
La misura del tempo
Gianrico Carofiglio
Novel · 248 pages · Crime · Guido Guerrieri, book 6
AI-generated summary:The lawyer Guido Guerrieri is visited by Lorenza, a dazzling girl he once loved, now worn down by the years. Her son is in prison for murder, and despite his doubts Guerrieri takes on the appeal.
Strega 2020 · Shortlist
Febbre
Jonathan Bazzi
Novel · 327 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In January 2016 a thirty-one-year-old man gets a fever that will not go away. Waiting for a diagnosis, he goes back to his childhood in Rozzano, the tough outskirts of Milan, as a stammering, gay, bookish boy.
Strega 2020 · Shortlist
Almarina
Valeria Parrella
Novel · 123 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Elisabetta teaches maths at the juvenile prison on the island of Nisida, off Naples. Each morning she leaves her thoughts in a locker. Then a new pupil arrives, a Romanian girl named Almarina.
Strega 2019 · Winner
M. Il figlio del secolo
Antonio Scurati
Novel · 773 pages · Historical, Politics · M, book 1
AI-generated summary:Milan, 1919: Benito Mussolini, a socialist leader expelled from his party and editor of a small newspaper, gathers the violent and the disaffected around him. A novel in which nothing is invented follows his rise from 1919 to 1925.
Strega 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Noise of the World”
Benedetta Cibrario
Novel · 751 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In the years before Italian unification, Anne Bacon, a melancholy, industrious Englishwoman, marries into the aristocracy of a small, archaic Piedmont and witnesses a great historical change from inside it.
Strega 2019 · Shortlist
La straniera
Claudia Durastanti
Novel · 304 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:Born to two deaf parents, a girl is taken from New York to a small village in Basilicata, then grows up and keeps moving, to Rome and London, piecing together a family whose story is one of bodies and words.
Strega 2019 · Shortlist
Fedeltà
Marco Missiroli
Novel · 256 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Carlo and Margherita call it 'the misunderstanding': the doubt that cracks their marriage after Carlo is seen in a university bathroom with a student. She felt unwell and he helped her, he says, and the student confirms it.
Strega 2019 · Shortlist
Addio fantasmi
Nadia Terranova
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A woman returns to her childhood home in Messina, which her mother is selling, and is confronted with the memory of her father, who disappeared years ago and whose body was never found.
Strega 2018 · Winner
La ragazza con la Leica
Helena Janeczek
Novel · 364 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:On 1 August 1937 a procession crosses Paris for the funeral of Gerda Taro, the first female photographer to die on a battlefield. The friends and lovers who knew her before she was Robert Capa's partner remember her.
Strega 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Game”
Carlo D’Amicis
Novel · 526 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Three people tell an interviewer, who wants to write a book about pleasure, about their lives in an erotic triangle: a dominant lover, a woman at the centre of male desire and her consenting, controlling husband.
Strega 2018 · Shortlist
Questa sera è già domani
Lia Levi
Novel · 224 pages · Historical, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Genoa, the years of the racial laws: a Jewish family with a son who is a frustrated prodigy, a bitter mother and a wise but hesitant father must decide whether to stay or to flee, and where.
Strega 2018 · Shortlist
Resto qui
Marco Balzano
Novel · 224 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:In Curon, a South Tyrolean village, the teacher Trina defies the Fascists who ban German, follows her deserter husband into the mountains and writes to her vanished daughter, as a dam threatens to drown the valley.
Strega 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Corsair: A Portrait of Natalia Ginzburg”
Sandra Petrignani
Nonfiction · 459 pages
AI-generated summary:A portrait of the writer Natalia Ginzburg, from her birth in Palermo and youth in Turin to her life in Rome, retraced through the houses she lived in, surviving witnesses and her friends at the publisher Einaudi.
Strega 2017 · Winner
Le otto montagne
Paolo Cognetti
Novel · 215 pages · Coming of age, Nature, Family
AI-generated summary:Pietro, a solitary city boy, spends his summers in a village at the foot of Monte Rosa, where he befriends Bruno, a cowherd his own age, and learns from his father to walk the mountains.
Strega 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Milanese Education”
Alberto Rollo
Novel · 317 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:A boy grows up in the new outskirts of 1950s Milan, between a communist father and a Catholic family, through school, cinema and the workers' struggles of his youth, while the industrial city changes around him.
Strega 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“It Is Right to Obey the Night”
Matteo Nucci
Novel · 363 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On a bend of the Tiber at the edge of Rome, a small community living in shacks and barges has taken in a man in flight, whom they call 'the doctor'. Slowly his past and his loss come to light.
Strega 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Most Beloved”
Teresa Ciabatti
Novel · 218 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:As a child she was the adored daughter of the Professor, head physician of the hospital in Orbetello, feared and loved by all. Grown up, the narrator sets out to learn who her powerful father really was.
Strega 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Company of False Souls”
Wanda Marasco
Novel · 238 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:From the hill of Capodimonte, Rosa speaks to the body of her dead mother, Vincenzina, reliving her mother's poor childhood, her marriage amid the rubble of postwar Naples and the money-lending in its alleys.
Strega 2016 · Winner
La scuola cattolica
Edoardo Albinati
Novel · 1280 pages · Coming of age, Crime, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Rome in the 1970s: a residential neighbourhood and a private school where nothing seems to happen, until some former pupils commit one of the most notorious crimes of the era. One of their classmates looks back.
Strega 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Naked Woman”
Elena Stancanelli
Novel · 156 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:After five years, Anna's relationship with Davide collapses in lies and betrayal. In a letter to her closest friend she confesses the year she spent sleepless and drunk, compulsively searching his phone and chats.
Strega 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Man of the Future”
Eraldo Affinati
Nonfiction · 177 pages
AI-generated summary:Following the life of the priest and teacher Lorenzo Milani from Florence to the mountain hamlet of Barbiana, the narrator also seeks his legacy among isolated educators and their pupils around the world.
Strega 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Boar Who Shot Liberty Valance”
Giordano Meacci
Novel · 452 pages · Speculative, Nature, Satire
AI-generated summary:In an invented village between Tuscany and Umbria, life goes on with its betrayals, debts and secrets, until a wild boar in the surrounding woods mysteriously gains human thought and the awareness of death.
Strega 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“If They Had”
Vittorio Sermonti
Novel · 210 pages · Historical, Autofiction, War
AI-generated summary:One May morning in 1945, partisans come to a house in Milan looking for a Fascist officer, talk at length and leave. From that episode a fifteen-year-old brother's memories unspool over seventy years.
Strega 2015 · Winner
La ferocia
Nicola Lagioia
Novel · 464 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:On a warm spring night a young woman walks naked and bloodied down the middle of a highway near Bari. When she is found dead hours later, she turns out to be the eldest daughter of the city's most powerful building family.
Strega 2015 · Shortlist
Storia della bambina perduta
Elena Ferrante
Novel · 480 pages · Family, Coming of age · L'amica geniale, book 4
AI-generated summary:Elena, now an established writer, separated and with two daughters, returns to Naples for a youthful love, while her friend Lila, who never left the neighbourhood, has become its charismatic leader and a computer entrepreneur.
Strega 2015 · Shortlist
Chi manda le onde
Fabio Genovesi
Novel · 471 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On the off-season coast of Versilia, Luna, an albino girl who sees with her imagination, her surfer brother Luca and their mother Serena, who raised them alone, are thrown off course by a sudden blow of fate.
Strega 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Like a Woman in Love”
Marco Santagata
Novel · 175 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:On 8 June 1290 the young poet Dante Alighieri stands before the body of Beatrice. Walking through Florence, he relives their love as the city's politics begin to threaten his marriage, his friendships and his life.
Strega 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Bride”
Mauro Covacich
Short stories · 185 pages
AI-generated summary:Seventeen stories in which real events meet invention: two strangers waiting to shoot on a human safari, an artist hitchhiking across Europe in a wedding dress, a young priest who will one day be pope, a man living with wolves.
Strega 2014 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Desire to Be Like Everyone”
Francesco Piccolo
Novel · 264 pages · Autofiction, Politics, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Through Berlinguer's funeral, the Moro kidnapping and twenty years of Berlusconi, a man retraces how he became himself, telling his own coming of age alongside the story of the Italian left.
Strega 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lisario, or the Infinite Pleasure of Women”
Antonella Cilento
Novel · 297 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In seventeenth-century Naples, Lisario, left mute by a botched operation, falls asleep whenever she cannot resist the adults' violence. A failed doctor hoping to restore his reputation is called to wake her.
Strega 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Unfaithful Father”
Antonio Scurati
Novel · 188 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:The day his wife bursts into tears in the kitchen saying she may not like men, Glauco, a forty-year-old chef and father of a three-year-old, sets out to find the truth about himself as a man.
Strega 2014 · Shortlist
La vita in tempo di pace
Francesco Pecoraro
Novel · 664 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:On 29 May 2015, a disillusioned sixty-nine-year-old engineer flies home from Egypt, where he works on a synthetic replacement for the dying coral reef. On the flight his mind travels back through seventy years of Italian life.
Strega 2014 · Shortlist
Non dirmi che hai paura
Giuseppe Catozzella
Novel · 250 pages · Migration, War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Samia, a girl from Mogadishu with running in her blood, trains at night in an empty stadium and dreams of the Olympics, while Somalia sinks ever deeper into war and religious extremism.
Strega 2013 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Resisting Is Useless”
Walter Siti
Novel · 319 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Tommaso, once an obese boy and a failed mathematician, has become a juggler of finance for organized crime, in a world where money rules, bodies are currency and clean and dirty money can no longer be told apart.
Strega 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sins of the Fathers”
Alessandro Perissinotto
Novel · 316 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:Turin, 2011: a successful manager at a multinational, known for cutting jobs, meets a stranger who mistakes him for someone else. The suspicion that he has a forgotten double becomes an obsession.
Strega 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Send Me Much Life”
Paolo Di Paolo
Novel · 158 pages · Historical, Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:Turin, carnival 1926: Moraldo, a student from the provinces, admires from afar a brilliant young publisher and anti-fascist, Piero, while falling for Carlotta, a street photographer about to leave for Paris.
Strega 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sons of the Same Father”
Romana Petri
Novel · 297 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Half-brothers Germano and Emilio, sons of the same charismatic, womanizing father by different mothers, meet again after a long silence. In a few days together, old resentments and the call of blood resurface.
Strega 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“No One Knows About Us”
Simona Sparaco
Novel · 252 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:After years of trying, Luce and Pietro go for one of the last scans before the birth of their son. When the image appears on the monitor, the doctor's smile fades: something is wrong.
Strega 2012 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Inseparable: The Friendly Fire of Memories”
Alessandro Piperno
Novel · 351 pages · Family · Il fuoco amico dei ricordi, book 2
AI-generated summary:The Roman brothers Filippo and Samuel Pontecorvo have always been inseparable. Then lazy Filippo suddenly becomes famous for an animated film, while ambitious Samuel's finances and engagement fall apart.
Strega 2012 · Shortlist
Qualcosa di scritto
Emanuele Trevi
Novel · 246 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Rome, early 1990s: a cynical, naive young writer takes a job at the Pier Paolo Pasolini archive, ruled by the irascible actress Laura Betti, who behaves as if possessed by the dead poet.
Strega 2012 · Shortlist
Il silenzio dell’onda
Gianrico Carofiglio
Novel · 294 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Twice a week a former undercover officer walks across Rome to see a psychoanalyst, often in silence. Memories surface of surfing with his father and of years spent among corruption and betrayal.
Strega 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Guilt”
Lorenza Ghinelli
Novel · 241 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Estefan is haunted by a childhood memory: perhaps a terrible crime, perhaps a false memory. His best friend Martino hides a secret too, until their paths cross with Greta, a nine-year-old orphan kept like a prisoner by her grandfather.
Strega 2012 · Shortlist
Nel tempo di mezzo
Marcello Fois
Novel · 256 pages · Historical, Family, Love
AI-generated summary:In 1943, the year of hunger and malaria, Vincenzo Chironi sets foot in Sardinia for the first time, carrying only a document with his name. In Nuoro his grandfather, a blacksmith, and his aunt Marianna are waiting for him.
Strega 2011 · Winner
Storia della mia gente
Edoardo Nesi
Nonfiction · 163 pages · Autofiction, Politics
AI-generated summary:A textile entrepreneur from Prato tells how his family firm and his city's thriving industry were swept away by globalization, and what it means to belong to the first generation poorer than its parents.
Strega 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Energy of the Void”
Bruno Arpaia
Novel · 264 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:At night a UN official races through the Swiss mountains towards Marseille with his teenage son. His wife, a physicist at CERN in charge of an experiment on the Large Hadron Collider, failed to come home the evening before.
Strega 2011 · Shortlist
La scoperta del mondo
Luciana Castellina
Nonfiction · 194 pages · Politics, Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:In July 1943 a Roman schoolgirl's tennis match with Mussolini's daughter is cut short by the dictator's arrest. Her diary from fourteen to eighteen follows her path through war and liberation to the Communist Party.
Strega 2011 · Shortlist
La vita accanto
Mariapia Veladiano
Novel · 186 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Rebecca is born so ugly that her mother never holds her and her father lets it happen. Raised by a beautiful aunt and a tearful nanny, she has perfect hands and a gift for the piano.
Strega 2011 · Shortlist
Mario Desiati
Novel · 258 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1975, fifteen-year-old Mimì leaves the Puglia coast to follow her father to a Swiss factory making asbestos cement. Years later, back home with a teenage daughter and no man, she faces what the dust has done to her people.
Strega 2010 · Winner
Canale Mussolini
Antonio Pennacchi
Novel · 536 pages · Historical, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:In the 1930s the Peruzzi, a large peasant family from the Po valley, are among the thousands of settlers sent south to farm the newly drained Pontine Marshes, led by the charismatic uncle Pericle.
Strega 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beside the Tiger”
Lorenzo Pavolini
Novel · 243 pages · Autofiction, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:At twelve, a boy sees a photo in his history book of the bodies hanged in Piazzale Loreto and learns that his grandfather was not a war hero but Alessandro Pavolini, one of Fascism's most ruthless ministers.
Strega 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Friends Hold All Things in Common”
Matteo Nucci
Novel · 217 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:After his father's death, Lorenzo spends a summer between Rome and Greece trying to learn who the elusive, unfaithful man really was, while the women in his life and his family all seem to keep something back.
Strega 2010 · Shortlist
Hanno tutti ragione
Paolo Sorrentino
Novel · 384 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Tony Pagoda, a Neapolitan crooner who has had talent, money and women, feels his world changing. After a short tour in Brazil he decides to disappear there, until years later someone offers a fortune to bring him back.
Strega 2010 · Shortlist
Acciaio
Silvia Avallone
Novel · 357 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In the concrete blocks of Piombino, in sight of the steelworks and the island of Elba, inseparable thirteen-year-old friends Anna and Francesca test their power over boys, until Anna falls in love and Francesca feels betrayed.
Strega 2009 · Winner
Stabat Mater
Tiziano Scarpa
Novel · 170 pages · Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a Venetian orphanage in the early eighteenth century, sixteen-year-old Cecilia plays the violin behind a grille by day and writes at night to the mother who abandoned her. Then a new violin teacher arrives: Antonio Vivaldi.
Strega 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“At Least the Hat”
Andrea Vitali
Novel · 405 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:In the lakeside town of Bellano under Fascism, founding a proper town band needs a man able to win over the mayor, the party secretary and the priest. Chance brings the accountant Onorato Geminazzi across the lake.
Strega 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Child Who Dreamed of the End of the World”
Antonio Scurati
Novel · 295 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Children at a nursery school in a northern Italian city accuse adults of terrible acts, and fear spreads across the country. A disillusioned professor is asked by a newspaper to investigate the case.
Strega 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Last Summer”
Cesarina Vighy
Novel · 190 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Seriously ill, a woman she calls Zeta looks back with irony on seventy irregular years: a birth out of wedlock, a childhood under the bombs, Venice and Rome, psychoanalysis, feminism and illness.
Strega 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Wolf's Instinct”
Massimo Lugli
Novel · 334 pages · Crime, Politics, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Rome, on the thin line between rich villas and homeless camps, a young man becomes 'the Wolf' amid assaults, betrayals and revenge, against the political violence of the 1970s.
Strega 2008 · Winner
La solitudine dei numeri primi
Paolo Giordano
Novel · 348 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:Two childhood episodes mark Alice and Mattia for life: a skiing accident that leaves her injured and a moment in a park when he abandons his disabled twin sister. As teenagers and adults their paths keep crossing.
Strega 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Illusion of Good”
Cristina Comencini
Novel · 209 pages · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a disillusioned former communist still cannot stop asking what communism was. A chance meeting with a young Russian pianist draws him into a mysterious family tragedy.
Strega 2008 · Shortlist
Non avevo capito niente
Diego De Silva
Novel · 368 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Vincenzo Malinconico, a Neapolitan lawyer who mostly pretends to work, is abandoned by his wife. Then he is assigned to defend a Camorra gravedigger, and the most beautiful woman in the courthouse falls for him.
Strega 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Naples Railway Station”
Ermanno Rea
Novel · 357 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:An old communist narrator wanders the desperate streets around the Naples central station at night and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Caracas, a former neo-Nazi skinhead who has converted to Islam.
Strega 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Seductions of Winter”
Lidia Ravera
Novel · 185 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A middle-aged man living alone in chaos wakes one day to find his flat transformed by Sophie, a cultured, reserved woman who says she works for his ex-wife and offers herself as his housekeeper.
Strega 2007 · Winner
Come Dio Comanda
Niccolò Ammaniti
Novel · 406 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:On a rain-soaked plain of sheds and car dealerships, a violent father and his teenage son live bound by a fierce love, with two hapless friends. One stormy night the four decide it is time to turn their lives around.
Strega 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Scent of Snow”
Franco Matteucci
Novel · 125 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:In a nameless village in the Italian mountains, Ugo has just drawn his first pension. After a long storm, deep snow covers everything, and he is seized by an urge to take out his old skis.
Strega 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Seasons of Water”
Laura Bosio
Novel · 270 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:On an estate among the rice fields, in a snowy March, the elderly owner's meeting with a young woman brings together a nun who fled her convent, a German deserter who has lost his memory, an old bat hunter and two shady sisters.
Strega 2007 · Shortlist
I giorni innocenti della guerra
Mario Fortunato
Novel · 240 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:In central Italy on the eve of the Second World War, a group of young people is caught up in what will become a civil war, while an English RAF pilot who loves Virginia Woolf and his close friend Edna, in bombed London, live parallel lives.
Strega 2007 · Shortlist
Mal di pietre
Milena Agus
Novel · 144 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:A passionate woman marries late, when she had stopped hoping, and meets the great love of her life by chance at a spa where she is being treated for kidney stones.
Strega 2006 · Winner
Caos calmo
Sandro Veronesi
Novel · 417 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On the day he saves a stranger from drowning, a seemingly accomplished man loses his wife. He takes to sitting in his car outside his daughter's school, and from that fixed point watches the lives of others come to him.
Strega 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Forbidden Lover”
Massimiliano Palmese
Novel · 153 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Carlo's love is violent as an obsession, frozen around an abandonment. He goes looking for Senia again on the Greek island of Serifos.
Strega 2006 · Shortlist
Pugni
Pietro Grossi
Short stories · 157 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Three stories of boys facing initiation into life: a well-mannered boxer who must meet a deaf, poor champion in the ring, two brothers given a horse each by their father, and a friend who suddenly decides he is a monkey.
Strega 2006 · Shortlist
La ragazza del secolo scorso
Rossana Rossanda
Nonfiction · 374 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Asked why she became a communist and why she still calls herself one, without a party or a post, a woman questions her memory and tells the story of her life, politics as a sentimental education.
Strega 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Chronicles from the City of Collapses”
Sergio De Santis
Novel · 136 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Over one week in a city that may or may not be Naples, the concrete of the buildings crumbles and every day the roar of collapses can be heard in the distance, in a world falling apart.
Strega 2005 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Night Traveller”
Maurizio Maggiani
Novel · 193 pages · War, Migration
AI-generated summary:A scholar of animal migration waits for the swallows on a Saharan plateau. Among his guide, a wandering poet and a journalist, he tells stories of other wanderings, from a bear in the Carnic forests to a besieged Bosnian city.
Strega 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Golden Age”
Edoardo Nesi
Novel · 337 pages · Satire, Family
AI-generated summary:In 2010, amid the ruin of Italy's small textile industry, a bankrupt Prato industrialist learns that he is terminally ill, and launches into the last venture of his life: to have a child by artificial insemination with Caterina, a beautiful young woman in a psychiatric clinic.
Strega 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The House of the Waves”
Giuseppe Conte
Novel · 337 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:In July 1822 the poet Shelley drowns in a shipwreck off Viareggio. Everyone blames a storm, but in Lerici a young harbour captain, once an officer in Napoleon's navy, suspects something more mysterious.
Strega 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Evil Is in Things”
Maurizio Cucchi
Novel · 145 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Pietro, distracted while reading Gogol's 'The Overcoat', wonders what strange thoughts and temptations are running through his head. At first it all seems to be in his mind, but the turmoil soon begins to show outside it.
Strega 2005 · Shortlist
Per grazia ricevuta
Valeria Parrella
Short stories · 105 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Stories set in a Naples far from folklore, among drug couriers and elegant art galleries, clandestine print shops and young graduates trying to escape the suffocating suburbs, about men and above all women chasing their desires.
Strega 2004 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Perfect Pain”
Ugo Riccarelli
Novel · 325 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A reserved young anarchist schoolteacher from the south settles in a Tuscan village, marries a widow and names his children after ideals. Around his family and a clan of pig dealers, a saga unfolds across Italian history.
Strega 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Waitings”
Elena Loewenthal
Novel · 202 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A white veil links the stories of three women of the same Jewish family across the twentieth century and its tragedies, from a girl covering her face before meeting her future husband to an old woman embroidering a tablecloth to celebrate Hitler's death.
Strega 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Western Allegro”
Francesco Piccolo
Novel · 241 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Mister Piccolo, a writer and journalist, is invited to see the world with eight colleagues. From the moment he boards a business-class flight to Sri Lanka he discovers that privilege is the one place that makes every other place the same.
Strega 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mystery of the Serny Inn”
Marco Fabio Apolloni
Novel · 284 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In nineteenth-century Rome, the eccentric patrons of the Serny inn, illusionists, men of letters, Russians and Frenchmen, tell stories over cups of tea from a samovar that is always boiling.
Strega 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Woman Who Lived for a Dream”
Maria Rosa Cutrufelli
Novel · 340 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1793, during the Terror, Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, waits in prison for her trial. Her last months are told in her own voice and those of twelve women who cross her path.
Strega 2003 · Winner
Vita
Melania G. Mazzucco
Novel · 448 pages · Historical, Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1903 two children from a poor village in southern Italy, twelve-year-old Diamante and nine-year-old Vita, land in New York, where they must grow up fast amid exploitation, violence and the temptations of the city.
Strega 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Visionary”
Franco Matteucci
Novel · 182 pages
AI-generated summary:Tullio Cusman, an orphan, taciturn and handsome, haunted by a sense of cosmic evil, grows up to become creative director of a satellite television channel that broadcasts nothing but death. Then he meets a young woman, Gaia.
Strega 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We Hoped for More”
Pietro Spirito
Novel · 188 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Just after the Second World War a strange figure settles in a village at the foot of the mountains in the Veneto: a former Japanese soldier who, learning that his city, Hiroshima, has been destroyed, decides never to go home.
Strega 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Mother's Heart”
Roberto Alajmo
Novel · 232 pages · Crime, Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:Cosimo Tumminia repairs bicycles in a Sicilian village where no one rides one, and he is said to bring bad luck. That is why some criminals choose him to keep a kidnapped child in his house.
Strega 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Writer Lives Here”
Sandra Petrignani
Nonfiction · 221 pages
AI-generated summary:A journey through the house museums of great women writers of the twentieth century, from Grazia Deledda's Sardinia to Marguerite Yourcenar's Maine, Colette's France, Karen Blixen's Denmark and Virginia Woolf's England, told through their rooms and objects.
Strega 2002 · Winner
Non ti muovere
Margaret Mazzantini
Novel · 353 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:A surgeon's fifteen-year-old daughter is brought into his own hospital after a scooter accident. Waiting outside the operating theatre, he silently confesses to her a secret passion for a derelict woman, Italia, years earlier.
Strega 2002 · Shortlist
Le bibliotecarie di Alessandria
Alessandra Lavagnino
Novel · 313 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:The saga of a family from 1870 to the end of the Second World War, growing like a knotty tree from ancestors far apart in place and social rank, and narrowing at last to a childhood and early youth.
Strega 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Earthquakes”
Cesare de Seta
Novel · 246 pages · Nature, Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:In the heart of Irpinia, devastated by the earthquake of 23 November 1980, a young geologist confronts precariousness, environmental ruin, the arrogance of local notables and the incompetence of politicians and experts.
Strega 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Dismantling”
Ermanno Rea
Novel · 373 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Vincenzo Buonocore, a worker turned technician, is put in charge of dismantling the Ilva steelworks before the Chinese buyers arrive to carry it away piece by piece. Taking the machines apart, he relives his life in the factory.
Strega 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In the Name of a Barbarian God”
Sergio Givone
Novel · 204 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:One evening in February 1921 a group of people dine as guests of a brother and sister who obscurely love each other. At the end the host says he is going duck hunting, but intends something extreme, and first leafs through notebooks holding his guests' stories.
Strega 2001 · Winner
Via Gemito
Domenico Starnone
Novel · 480 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In Naples, a railway clerk convinced he is destined to be a great painter rages against his job, his city and above all his wife. Decades later his eldest son tells the story of this overbearing, fabulating father.
Strega 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Thursday, After Five”
Antonio Debenedetti
Novel · 190 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Piero, a modest man, lives in the shadow of a well-born friend who moved to Rome after the war to make films and, tormented by his homosexuality, married the fascinating, disillusioned Magda. Piero falls in love with her.
Strega 2001 · Shortlist
Danilo Donati
Novel · 237 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Dale, a young American on the run from an ever harsher war, runs into two friends coming back from an outing near Fiesole, and his beauty bursts into their lives.
Strega 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Balls of Bread”
Paola Mastrocola
Novel · 237 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:August: Emilia, a forty-year-old photographer, goes on holiday to Sardinia with a six-month-old baby, an eleven-year-old son who wants to be left alone to fish with balls of bread, and a Portuguese babysitter who speaks no Italian.
Strega 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ghosts”
Vincenzo Cerami
Novel · 299 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Morena cannot love, because no one wants to be loved, and she refuses to accept hypocrisy. The man she always loved has vanished into the crowd chasing his dreams as a musician, and she drifts from city to city.
Strega 2000 · Winner
Ernesto Ferrero
Novel · 312 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:May 1814: a plump, frightened man lands on Elba looking like a travelling merchant. He is Napoleon, and for three hundred days his new librarian, Martino Acquabona, tries to read the deposed emperor and keep fresh storms at bay.
Strega 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Indivisible”
Andrea Canobbio
Novel · 226 pages
AI-generated summary:Dragged onto an organized tour of India, Stefania faces the country with wide-open eyes, exasperated by her hypochondriac sister and irrationally drawn to a man with a disfigured face.
Strega 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Houses, Loves, Universes”
Fosco Maraini
Novel · 702 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Clé, a lively, rebellious boy with an insatiable curiosity, grows up between the wisdom of Tuscan peasants and his English mother's books about the East, the first steps of a life spent leaping from country to country and culture to culture.
Strega 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The New Era”
Luca Doninelli
Novel · 155 pages
AI-generated summary:A quiet teacher of Italian literature leads an ordinary life in an ordinary city. Among his pupils is Chiara, a naive, sincere girl who writes clumsy New Age stories, and their meeting sets off something terrible.
Strega 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Way of China”
Renata Pisu
Nonfiction · 190 pages
AI-generated summary:In 1957 a young Italian woman goes to study at Peking University with a few comrades. She stays four years, and never stops going back to the country that infected her with an incurable 'China sickness'.
