In an apocalyptic world, Lena Morse is employed in a cleaning company. Day and night she runs through the big city where public transports have stopped working for years, and the social segregation has reached extreme consequences. Grown up without the affection of a family, Lena becomes a woman in a microcosm of alienated people, ghost children, sadistic individuals and apparitions that populate her days on the verge of survival. A strange love and the hope of a different future push Lena to seek answers no longer about who she was, but about who she will become, while the mystery of a beastly and unnamed attraction seems to haunt her, perhaps to kill her, perhaps to reveal who she is. Set in the slums of an alienating and vivid metropolis, Il Grido confirms the talent of a storyteller who has the ability to invent stories by lending voice to our nightmares and our fears. With a bewitching writing and surprising characters, Funetta is able to entertain us and reveal what we are projecting into a future that already has much of our present.
Thanks to the Prize the book has been translated in English by Todd Portnowitz with the title The Cry and waiting for being published in the Unites States.

---

Luciano Funetta / Read Bio

Sandra Petrignani describes the intellectual adventure of one of the greatest protagonists of the Italian cultural scene, Natalia Ginzburg, author of Lessico Familiare from her Sicilian birthplace to Turin and to the exile apartment in Rome in Campo Marzio, in front of Italo Calvino’s home. Petrignani meets several witnesses, in some cases now centenarians, of Natalia’s human, literary, political adventure. A work of study and research that describes a complex writer who is in some respects unknown, crystallized as she has always been in the autobiographical but reticent pages of her most famous books. Next to Natalia - so they all called her, simply by name - prestigious intellectuals moved, who were her friends and workmates: Calvino, Giulio Einaudi and Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Adriano Olivetti and Cesare Garboli, Carlo Levi and Lalla Romano and many others. A great history of "conspiracy in the light of the sun" against Fascism in which intellectuals and the most brilliant artists were involved.
Natalia is a "constellation" and her story intertwines with the history of Italy. Her romance and passionate destiny: the only woman in a male universe to share a cultural power that in Italy completely excluded the female part.
Thanks to the Prize the book has been translated in English by Minna Proctor and waiting for being published in the Unites States.

---

Sandra Petrignani / Read Bio

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In the story Who Will Greet You at Home — a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker — a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In Wild a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In The Future Looks Good three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in Light a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.
Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.
Thanks to the Prize the book has been translated in Italian by Tiziana Lo Porto and published in Italy by SEM Editore with the title Quando un Uomo cade dal Cielo.

---

Lensley Nneka Arimah / Read Bio