La Ghianda literary prize is awarded to an author in recognition of his or her literary and artistic work devoted to the environment, landscapes, and nature.
This year’s award is presented to the poet and writer Antonella Anedda (born 1955, Rome).
Born into a family of Sardinian-Corsican origin, Anedda studied the classics in Italy and abroad. At age 33, her first publication was widely acclaimed by poets and critics for its originality. Over the next three decades she published 16 volumes, including Residenze invernali, Notti di pace occidentale, Il catalogo della gioia, Isolatria, Historiae, andGeografie, which garnered her numerous literary prizes, including Diego Valeri, Montale, Frascati, Viareggio-Repaci, Pascoli, Puškin, and Cesare Pavese.
Her early works contained verses that demonstrated her ties to the earth, her roots, an intimate tension of strong words and character common to contemporary female poets, and her ties to the earth conceived as a work of growth and evolution of trees, grass, landscapes, continents, and woodlands. There’s always someone watching something; there’s always something happening that we the reader see through her web of words. According to Roberto Galaverni, in Nuovi poeti italiani contemporanei, Guaraldi: “A remarkable ability to capture feelings and emotions in sturdy formal structures, in refined arabesques, full of tenseness and existential hopes.” Gian Mario Villalta states in Il respiro e lo sguardo, BUR: “What captivates the reader is the perception of a gesture proffering a word. While the word is left to testify to itself, to settle into the blankness not of the page but of the emptiness that the page represents, the sparse, sharp images of suffering and affection.” Yes, because this clamor is suspended in air, in a pentagram that we can share, we, the fortunate readers, and she, the modeler of clay.
