Two days after winning Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, Andrea Bajani stopped by a bookstore in the center of Rome. He expected to browse quietly but instead found his novel “L’anniversario (The Anniversary)” dominating displays and being carried out in readers’ hands. For Bajani, a professor in the practice and international writer in residence at Rice University, the moment made the scale of winning the Premio Strega undeniable.
“I knew how important the prize was, but I didn’t really realize what its impact would be,” Bajani said of being recognized throughout Italy. “It was strange and even unsettling but then also heartening to see that literature can still reach a wide audience.”
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,” Strega-winning author and critic Emanuele Trevi wrote in his nomination of the novel. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri described “The Anniversary” as “a book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory and the totalitarianism of family like no other.”
The book’s rise in popularity has been swift. “The Anniversary” has held the No. 1 spot on Italy’s charts for months; sales have passed 100,000 copies; and the book has become a cultural lightning rod.
“I hit a taboo talking about families and estrangement,” Bajani said. “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 attention has thrust Bajani into a whirlwind schedule. By the end of the year, he will have toured Italy, Spain and Germany with launches also in Hungary, Portugal and the Netherlands before continuing to South America. In total, the novel will be published in nearly 30 countries.
“I haven’t come down from that high,” Bajani said. “I’m still trying to surf rather than resist this wave.”
Yet for Bajani, the achievement is about more than commercial success.
“We bring complexity, that’s what literary authors do,” he said. “It’s a cultural and political achievement because you get to spread that complexity. You don’t know what it creates from there.”
The next step for “The Anniversary” is an English translation from Penguin UK due in spring 2026. Bajani said reading Geoffrey Brock’s translation gave him an unexpected sense of homecoming.
“I wrote it in Houston,” Bajani said. “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.”
What Bajani stumbled into in Rome — a book suddenly everywhere — just might be waiting for him again when the English edition lands next spring.