Nicola La Gioia

Nicola Lagioia, born in Bari in 1973, made his fiction debut in 2001 with the novel Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj (senza risparmiare se stessi), published by minimum fax. He followed that up in 2004 with Occidente per principianti (Einaudi). His stories have been published in a number of collections, including Patrie impure (Rizzoli, 2003), La qualità dell'aria (minimum fax, 2004), which he curated jointly with Christian Raimo, Periferie (Laterza, 2006), Deandreide (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2006), Ho visto cose (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2008) and La storia siamo noi (Neri Pozza, 2008). With the novel Riportando tutto a casa (Einaudi, 2009), he won the SuperPremio Vittorini award, the Volponi Prize and the Viareggio Prize for fiction. In 2015 he won the Strega Prize for La ferocia (Einaudi), published in English as Ferocity. Since 2010 he has been one of the presenters of Pagina3, a daily press review of cultural features broadcast on the Radio 3 channel of Italian State broadcaster Rai. From 2013 to 2015 he was a member of the selection committee for the Venice Film Festival, and in 2020 he served with the Venice event again, this time on the jury for its principal competition. In 2017 he was appointed director of the Turin International Book Fair. His recent non-fiction novel La città dei vivi came out in autumn 2020, published by Einaudi.