The Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto is pleased to support the participation of exceptional, award-winning Italian author
Viola Di Grado
at the
Toronto International Festival of Authors 2023
Friday September 29, 2023 | 6:00 PM
Brigantine Room
Harbourfront Centre | 235 Queens Quay W, Toronto
Click here for tickets and details
Viola Di Grado is one of Italy’s most acclaimed new voices having been the youngest winner of the Campiello First Novel Award when she was just 23.
At this year’s edition of the Festival she will present her latest novel Blue Hunger/Fame blu. On a journey from Rome to Shanghai the novel will take the reader on a visually stunning, taboo-demolishing voyage into the depths of the psyche, from mourning to falling in lust-all in a city of potent dreams, stories, and stimulations.
Viola Di Grado will be joined by Priya Guns author of Your Driver is Waiting, for a conversation about how journeys of discovery shape their two electrifying, propulsive novels, crossing cities and continents, transgressing boundaries of desire and love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With her first novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, published when she was 23 years old, Viola Di Gradobecame the youngest winner of the 2011 Campiello First Novel Award and the youngest finalist for Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, The Strega. It won the Rapallo Carige Award and was a bestseller in Italy and the USA. Her second novel, Hollow Heart, was a finalist for the PEN Literary Award, the Italian Prose in Translation Award and the International Dublin Literary Award 2017. Her third novel Bambini di Ferro was published in 2015 to much critical and academic acclaim, followed by Fuoco al cielo in 2019 which was a Strega candidate and awarded the Premio Viareggio jury’s selection. Granted with the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship,the Garzanti Dictionary named her as one of the most representative authors in the last decades. She has an undergraduate degree in Eastern Languages from the University of Turin and a Masters in East Asian Studies from the University of London. She has lived in Leeds, Kyoto, Rome and is now in London. She’s a contributor for La Stampa, Linus, and has been invited to major festivals worldwide.
