The Costa Smeralda award is back which, for this third edition, exceptionally concerns works published in the two years of the pandemic.

The finalists , announced today, are for the fiction Lidia Ravera with "Avanti, Parla" (Bompiani, 2021), Silvana La Spina with "The Viceroy Man" (Neri Pozza Editore, 2021), Michele Mari with "The majestic ruins of Sferopoli "(Einaudi, 2021). For the essays Roberto Casati with "Ocean. A philosophical navigation" (Einaudi, 2022), Benedetta Craveri with "La contessa" (Adelphi, 2021) and Carlo Ossola with "Characters of the Divine Comedy" (Marsilio, 2021).

They were chosen by a jury made up of the artistic director Stefano Salis , the Italianist Lina Bolzoni , professor at the Normale di Pisa and at New York University, the novelist Marcello Fois , the writer Elena Loewenthal , director of the Circolo dei Leggi di Torino Foundation, and by Chiara Valerio , writer and editorial director.

In addition to the winners chosen by the jury, the award also includes two other awards : the International one for 2022 is awarded to the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk ; the Culture of the Mediterranean, attributed to a personality who distinguished himself for the enhancement of the cultures of our sea and the peoples who inhabit it, to Giuseppe Barbera , full professor of Arboreal crops at the University of Palermo.

All winners will be given a work by the sculptor Giuseppe Sanna .

The awards ceremony will take place at the Porto Cervo Conference Center on May 28th .

"We are really proud to carry on the tradition of the Costa Smeralda Award, an expression of the best contemporary literature and non-fiction - said Renzo Persico , president of the Costa Smeralda Consortium - which after the pandemic has stopped restarts with a renewed momentum and precisely from the presence in Costa Smeralda of the Nobel Prize for literature Orhan Pamuk ".