A Golden Anniversary
With his award-winning novel, “L’Anniversario,” Rice’s Andrea Bajani has become an Italian literary sensation — and ignited a national debate.
By Brandi Smith
When Andrea Bajani won Italy’s most prestigious literary award last summer, he didn’t just make headlines — he sparked a national conversation. For the Rice professor in the practice and international writer in residence, the honor was both exhilarating and slightly surreal, as when he wandered into a bookshop in Rome, only to find his book, “L’anniversario” (“The Anniversary”), staring back at him from every display.
“I haven’t come down from that high,” Bajani says. “I’m still trying to surf rather than resist this wave.”
Across Italy, Bajani’s novel has become a literary phenomenon. “I knew how important the prize was, but I didn’t really realize what its impact would be,” he says. “It was strange and even unsettling, but then also heartening to see that literature can still reach a wide audience.”
Selling more than 100,000 copies, “The Anniversary” held the No. 1 spot on Italy’s charts for months as the book has become a cultural lightning rod. “I hit a taboo talking about families and estrangement,” Bajani says. “In a country like Italy, this really struck a nerve, and this made the book controversial after the victory. Then even more people started reading it.”
The Premio Strega, established in 1947, is Italy’s most renowned literary award. Winners are selected by a jury of more than 600 critics, writers and cultural figures, and the competition receives national attention for months.
“‘The Anniversary’ is, first and foremost, a novel of liberation,” wrote fellow Strega laureate Emanuele Trevi in his nomination. Jhumpa Lahiri described it as “a book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory and the totalitarianism of family like no other.”
In the months since his win, Bajani has been on a whirlwind book tour across Europe and South America, with translations planned in nearly 30 countries. An English edition, translated by Geoffrey Brock for Penguin Books UK, arrives this spring.
“I wrote [the book] in Houston,” Bajani says. “I was telling an Italian story but living in an American context. When I finally got the translation by Geoff, I thought, ‘Oh, this is the book I wanted to write.’ The English version, in a way, is the book coming home.”
From the Winter 2026 issue of Rice Magazine