Title: Wintry, pp146
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: La nave di Teseo
Rigths sold in Spain (Libros del Asteroide), France (Éditions Sous sol), Egypt (Logha Publishing), UK (New Cross Press)
Prizes
- Strega Prize 2024: second place
- Flaiano Award 2024 award: finalist
- Lussu Award 2024 award: winner
- Wondy Award 2024 award: winner
- Valle d'Aosta Award 2024: winner
- Bergamo Award 2025: finalist
Author of short stories, novels, radio plays, songs and librettos for the theatre, Dario Voltolini (Turin, 1959) has written, among others, “A metropolitan intuition”, “Rincorse”, “Waveforms”, “10”, “Primaverile”, “The monkeys have inadvertently left the cage”, “Foravìa”, “Pacific Palisades”.
For the publishing house La nave di Teseo he wrote “II Giardino degli Aranci”, Invernale (second in the 2024 Strega Prize), Su (a collection of wide-ranging interventions on culture (2025) and for Baldini + Castoldi, Dagli undici metri (2025).
Reading Dario Voltolini one is led to think that one can do without the world: his words are enough, his sparkling descriptions, capable of grasping things and arousing them like no other.
Tiziano Scarpa - Strega Prize
"Literary mastery, torment, composed fury, beauty, desperation, and modesty. The final pages of this book bring tears to your eyes."
Antonio Moresco, author of Songs of Chaos
'Winter' is a powerful novel, one that knocks you down while lifting you up and grabbing you from behind while staring you in the face—and Voltolini is a great writer, there's little you can do about it.
Sandro Veronesi - Two-time Strega Prize winner
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The gaze of the twenty-year-old son is cloaked in humanity, shrouded in modesty; never judgmental, it skims like a swallow through his parents' lives and finally penetrates them. He questions evil, shares his suffering with us, caresses and mourns his father, page after page. One senses respect, intelligence, and kindness. Winter is a novel written in a state of grace, imbued with brilliant reflections, overflowing with love and great respect. Federica De Paolis
Title: From Eleven Meters Away, pp. 140
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: Baldini *Castoldi October 2024
Rigths: r. vivian literary agency
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The book tells the story of a goalkeeper from his youth to the first team.
We discuss elements of an athlete's footballing life that are a metaphor for our own individual lives: predisposition, talent, training, and dedication. We focus in particular on one aspect: "intuition," which we follow when faced with alternative choices.
This intuitive ability is both a talent and the result of mental, personal, and character growth.
The development of this ability is recounted by following the young athlete's evolutionary steps and culminates in a surprising ending that condenses his entire journey: at the crucial point of his career, the goalkeeper finds himself face to face with his opponent during a penalty kick that will determine his team's victory or defeat in the final of a crucial tournament. For the first time in his career, the goalkeeper waits for his intuition to tell him which direction to dive to save the penalty (an intuition that, once developed within him, has always guided him psychologically and physically, making him an astonishing champion), but it doesn't come. The opponent begins his run-up, and the goalkeeper waits for the intuition to save the penalty, waiting at every step of the opponent, waiting until the moment he is about to kick. But no intuition comes to his aid, and so he stands motionless on the goal line in despair. The player opts for an arrogant chip, and the ball simply flies into the goalkeeper's arms. No intuition, no choice: they were the right thing to do.
Awards:
Finalist for the 2025 Gianni Mura Award
Title: The Orange Garden
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: La Nave di Teseo, pp120, 2022
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Nino Nino, this is the name of the protagonist, met Luciana in high school and fell in love with her in the extreme and daring way that belongs only to her first love: to attract her attention, the extreme pleasure that he felt without restraint, he draws rainbows and offers them to him as a gift every day at the interval between one lesson and another. in the presence of Luciana Luciana, bewildered, accepts these bizarre tributes, leaving no room for anything else. but then he inexplicably "gets engaged" with Attilio and the story with Nino Nino ends even before it begins. Now, after many years, Luciana and Nino Nino have an appointment at the Giardino degli Aranci: they met again by chance at Ikea a few days before, both are married, have children but the desire to chat, to retrace the past is strong and pushes them towards this meeting. This is how Nino Nino, going towards the Orange Garden, finds himself talking with himself, thinking back to the girls who attracted him before the appearance of Luciana in his life, and recognizing that precisely that passion so strong it leaves no space to uncertainties and fears, painless despite the incomplete outcome of his efforts, he made him become a man capable of authenticating himself to the female universe. Until, during the meeting with Luciana, curiosity takes over and he asks her how things really went in high school ... A writing in a state of grace, clear and precise, to describe a luminous sentimental education.
Title: The Hole, forthcoming
Author: Gessica Franco Carlevero
Publisher: Sellerio Editore
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
https://www.dallacartalloschermo.com/post/recensione-il-buco-gessica-franco-carlevero
Reading this novel raises many questions, including this: is there still an adult life to describe for an entire generation that has no future to call home?
An original and truthful novel that I recommend to anyone who wants to better understand the new generation.
Gessica Franco Carlevero was born in Canale in 1980 and lives in Marseille.
She directs the literary magazine La Bibliothèque italienne, a project aimed at promoting contemporary Italian literature in France, and works as a communications and marketing manager for a winery.
Among his publications, the novel Metà Guaro metà Grappa, Fandango, 2006 (Awarded at the Budapest First Novel Festival), the texts on creative writing Meravigliosamente and A mente libera (Einaudi Scuola) and several collections published among others in Panta (Bompiani), L'Accalappiacani (Derive e Approdi), L'immaginazione, effe and L'inquieto.
Thirty-five years old and a hole in her head the circumference of a glass.
The protagonist began tearing out her hair as a child, when her father went into hiding due to gambling debts and her mother began a relationship with a violent and emotional underage boy.
Some children suffer the lives of adults waiting for time to pass, invisible to others and to themselves. They grow up unprepared and incapable, with the sole imperative of not repeating what they once lived.
After graduation, the protagonist doesn't know which direction to take and becomes involved with Giacomo, a Venetian boy she meets by chance.
In the seventh month of pregnancy, for no apparent reason and without knowing a word of French, they loaded the bags onto a van and left for Marseille.
And at that point motherhood turns out to be harder than expected. Idiosyncrasies emerge between the idea of an imaginary motherhood and the reality of the facts and the memories of herself as a daughter.
In her new situation as a mother and wife, the protagonist finds herself experiencing some situations that her mother had faced in the past, with all the determination not to repeat the pattern, despite herself.
And the lack of the father, who never returned, and of the absent though present mother, continues to manifest itself in that hole in the head.
A tic, they said at the beginning, trichotillomania, she discovered much later, witness of the past that affects the present despite the will to avoid it.
astbookspa.it/index.php/2025/07/18/il-buco-gessica-franco-carlevero /
But what makes Gessica Franco Carlevero's novel so vibrant, and in its own way luminous, is the language. A language that bends and adapts to the disordered, sharp, tender, and cutting thoughts of its protagonist. Irma's voice is real, alive, incandescent. It accompanies you in her reflections while she breastfeeds, while she writes, while she argues, while she observes the world from her small, great "hole." And it's not a voice crafted for pleasure. It's a voice that questions and that lingers.
Title: The Island and Time
Author: Claudia Lanteri
Rights sold to: Folio Verlag in Germany;
Métaillé éditions in France.
Claudia Lanteriwas born in Caltanissetta. Her parents, who founded a Teatro Stabile here, passed on to her a passion for stories from a very young age.
After graduating in Modern Literature in Palermo, she continued his studies in Rome with a master's degree for creative professions from the Luiss Business School. She lived in London for five years, collaborating with various fashion, theatre, cooking and sports companies as an artworker and web designer. Since 2015 she has returned to live in Sicily, where she works as a consultant in the field of strategic communication and digital innovation, combining her humanistic education with the visual skills consolidated abroad.
Passionate about photography and literary criticism, she would like to write much more fiction and fewer editorial plans. The Empty Island is his first novel
In this insular detective story where a tight plot meets powerful literary writing, the events take place in a time that is both defined (the 1960s) and undefined, mobile, in a certain sense: a time in which everything keeps happening, in which the past mixes with the present.
An anomalous event, after the initial upheaval, is reduced to nothingness incorporated into the unchanging habits and rhythms of the inhabitants of a small community.
But not for Nofriu, who cannot resume his former life and who remains forever hooked - along with the reader - on the unsolved enigma.
Winner of the Bergamo 2024 Award
Franco Stelzer was born in Trento in 1956.
He spent many years in Bologna and Germany: he was a teacher and translator from German . For Einaudi he published Ano di volpi argentate ( 2000) Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei ( 2003) Cosa diremo agli angeli ( 2018) and for Maestrale Matematici nel sole ( 2009) .
Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany). Bodo and his mother work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing shirts. Pillowcases, less so. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves his mother. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border in France, Bodo's love takes over all of Bodo. Bodo is a wonderful character, created by the art of Franco Stelzer, a master storyteller, a pen that does not write: it tattoos. Bodo is a gift Stelzer gives us, he is a presence we do not forget. The text has Central European sounds and ribbing, a soul that echoes non-Italian literature, but inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to its delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. The writer demonstrates extreme confidence of hand. His empathy for the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.
Title: The Light Stretcher
Author: Franco Stelzer
Publisher: Hopefulmonster, pp 2023, pp 88
Rights: r.vivian literary agency