The discovery of an unpublished collection of letters by Grazia Deledda earned Giancarlo Porcu, philologist and editor of the Il Maestrale publishing house, the special InediTo RitrovaTo prize, awarded as part of the XXIII edition of the InediTo Prize - Colline di Torino 2024. The official proclamation of the winners of the Award will be held tomorrow at 1pm at the Book Fair, while the awards ceremony will take place in the evening, at 8.30pm, at the Teatro Vittoria in via Gramsci in Turin.

In past editions, recognition has gone to, among others, writings by Primo Levi, Alfonso Gatto, Italo Svevo, Alessandro Manzoni. This year Grazia Deledda made a name for herself with the correspondence brought to light by Giancarlo Porcu (already an explorer in 2022 of an "American correspondence" of the writer, contained in the new edition of the novel After the Divorce edited by the same scholar for Il Maestrale) .

These are thirty letters - the archival source of which will be revealed upon publication - sent by Deledda to the management and administration of the magazine La Rassegna Nazionale di Firenze (where in 1901 "After the Divorce" appeared in installments). They cover a period from 1899 to 1904, through crucial years in the life of the writer, who began contacts with the prestigious magazine from her Nuoro, continued them from her stay in Cagliari, and then continued the epistolary relationship from her new residence in Rome, where she she moved in March 1900 following her marriage to Palmiro Madesani.

The correspondence concerns the works sent by Deledda to the periodical and shed light on the gestation and editorial history of the novels “Elias Portolu” and “After divorce”, and some important short stories. In particular, it emerges from these letters that Deledda places herself among the "Catholic novelists" - an admirer of Antonio Fogazzaro - among those Catholics willing, however, to bow "before all the truths of life to draw good from them and do hate evil." But we also discover new details of the writer's contacts with Giacomo Puccini for the reduction of the novel "La via del male" to a booklet, and many other information that can be learned with the next publication of the entire correspondence, edited and introduced by Porcu , in the University of Cagliari magazine Bollettino di Studi Sardi directed by Giovanni Lupinu and Paolo Maninchedda.