World Literary Awards

← Back to Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci)

Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci) Premio Viareggio-Rèpaci

Edition 73 (2002)

Literature prizeNovelPoetryCriticismDebut/Newcomer prizeInternational prize (international category)Special prize

Winners

6 people
Fleur Jaeggy Winner

Set on a Mediterranean cruise, the novel follows a fifteen-year-old girl as she measures the distance from her ailing father and the pull of a world she has not yet known. As memory overlaps with the present, family estrangement and the pain of growing up emerge with a cool, exacting force.

One voyage becomes the beginning of a life.

144 pages
family estrangementcoming of agememoryvoyageself-discovery

This poetry collection aligns bodily unease with social distortion and makes language itself bear that strain. Rather than softening pain or unease, it drives them forward through sharp sound, rhythm, and pressure.

It lets the break in body and society resonate as a break in language.

141 pages
poetrythe bodyillnesssocial distortionlinguistic experiment

This critical study examines the role the essay has played in modern literature from both historical and theoretical angles. Ranging from Montaigne to the present, it maps the meeting point between style and thought with unusual clarity.

It redraws the map of the essay and restores its literary centrality.

249 pages
literary criticismessaystylemodern literatureintellectual history
Lina Bolzoni Winner

This cultural history traces how preaching and images worked together to sustain memory and belief before print. Through concrete examples, it explains the bond between visual expression and oral transmission from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.

It rereads preaching as a technique of images as much as of words.

192 pages
cultural historyMiddle Agespreachingvisual culturemnemonics

Using the frame of classical tragedy, this verse drama explores the tension between the body, ritual, violence, and fate. Its strict meter and stage-bound language give mythic material a contemporary urgency.

It borrows myth to sharpen the outline of modern feeling and violence.

158 pages
theatretragedyverse dramaclassical themesembodiment
Barbara Spinelli Special Award

This essay collection reconsiders the politics and ethics of memory in Europe as a whole. Through concrete cases in the Balkans, Germany, Italy, Austria, and beyond, it examines the forces that push history toward oblivion.

It asks Europe, drifting toward forgetting, to account for memory again.

420 pages
memorytotalitarianismEuropean politicshistorical consciousnessessays